Sponsored Grow Journal, Featuring The Cultiuana CT-720 LED Grow Light, 27gal SIP Containers & Clones

[CaptainLucky]

I don't expect a lot of problems to show up, quickly or not, since this is still an organic grow. The soil is definitely getting enough moisture in each of the 7g containers, and at least with this design, we know that the SIP works well. I am going to experiment with some smaller tubs to start my next plants in, and am looking seriously at some 12 gallon tubs to run single 7 gallon plants in. For now we are dealing with these 27 gallon monster tubs under a monster light.

A careful look at the room shows me that I have enough room for the light where it is at, if the plants don't stretch more than 100%. I will be moving a trigger light to the room before I flip, just for this purpose.

The plants are loving the SIPs and loving their new @Cultiuana light! All of the plants, if sent to bloom today, would have 15-30 buds apiece, and appear that they will be highly productive plants. In this mylar lined room, with the 720w of bloom power this light is going to produce, I am confident that we are going to get lots of tight hard buds.

Here are the plants today, 1 day after feeding and all looking extremely healthy.

That’s a great looking grow Em, you certainly can grow some awesome plants. CL

 

[Emilya Green]

TRANSITION ALERT !!!

Today is a good day! According to the email that I received an hour ago, our second caregiver license is now active. This means that my limit on blooming plants has gone from 6 to 12, so now I can legally go to bloom with these 6 overly healthy plants. My deep/far red LED strip was stripped from the Nextlight MEGA in the other room, and hastily installed in this room. The big lights went off for the first time at 6pm, having been on since 6am. The trigger light stayed on for 10 minutes to put these girls to bed early tonight.

Tomorrow at 5:50am, the trigger lights will come on again, for 10 minutes before the @Cultiuana CT-720 comes on. The red light, which so completely goes through the green leaves that it barely leaves a shadow, will do its work. Stretch will now be held to a minimum as we transition into bloom.

 

[Emilya Green]

Transition, day 2

Just a quick, lazy, telephoto zoom shot of the back room, originally known and labeled as the Mother Room, then Veg Room #2, and now the Bloom Room for the clones, featuring the @Cultiuana light.

All is well so far... but say it with me.... no stretch... no stretch... no stretch!

To further aid the plants in transitioning without a need to stretch to find more light, the CT-720 has just been turned up to 80%... I switched it to 60% yesterday. My light meter indicated 57k LUX in the middle of the top of the canopy. I have had several lights that could barely produce that much light at full power, like that big one in the other room. This light is a beast! 720w.... if LED is twice as efficient as HID, this is like having 1400w of HID light above these lucky plants.

I am finally adding a 220 circuit up here in the attic. With all these big lights, and soon, space heaters... I am going to need it.

 

[Emilya Green]

Transition, Day 3

So far, all good. No one is stretching yet. The Deep Red lights have been centered over the grow, above the horizontal slats of the CT-720 so that all of the far red leds are showing toward the plants. With careful placement, only one deep red led is occluded due to its position above the big light.

I was too late to get a good shot of the growth in here tonight, so I am settling with a flash shot while the trigger lights were still on.

 

[Emilya Green]

Transition, Day 4

The @Cultiuana CT-720 is now on full power, and I just measured 88k LUX at the top of the canopy. These are the highest light readings my meter has ever seen. The plants all seem to love it.

We have gotten some stretch but so far nothing that I need to react to. I am going to have to hang the light better though, so that I can start moving it up toward the ceiling... that day is coming soon.

Frankly, there is more bulk to these 6 plants than I have ever seen in one of my cannabis gardens. Between the SIPs, the nutrients and this amazing light, this will easily be the biggest harvest I have ever had.

 

[ReservoirDog]

That is precisely why I have a deep red light ready to install in there when I flip... which will be fairly soon... just waiting on my second caregiver license to be approved so I can be in bloom with more than 6 plants, and it should come through any day now. There is no sense in waiting any longer with these 3 month old clones, since it is obvious they have taken to the SIP very well. The roots must be as impressive as the plants are, above ground.

With the deep red light guiding them through stretch, it has been fairly well proven that deep red for the first 10 minutes before the @Cultiuana comes on, will keep stretch to about 60% of the present height, especially after I crank up the big light to 80% at first and then 100% as we transition to bloom. Even at 100% stretch at this point, I still have room vertically... barely.

I also like it very much that Cultiuana is watching this grow, so they can witness the effect that just deep red used as a trigger light has on this grow, to keep stretch to a minimum. I think a similar benefit could be seen regarding trichomes with switchable UV light, only running it for a few hours around noon time, and those experiments will be done over this next year as I become able to install those specialty supplemental lights in both rooms. I dream of a commercial light that has the ability to run just these banks of lights on a special circuit separate to the one that keeps entire full spectrum being lit. I had a friend who had built one of these back more than a decade ago and he called it his dial-a-light. He was way ahead of his time. Mahalo my friend, wherever you are.

I own such a light, actually, two of them. Has three indiv controllable channels, each with own Meanwell driver. FR 720-30nm, UV (mild UV there are no decent UVB diodes on the market yet, only in tubes) and then the Cree 660s and Samsung L301h's share the largest Meanwell. The fixture is a bar light, like your tester, but has ten bars, and over 2900 diodes. To control each group automatically you need a controller 200$, but you can control them manually with switches. Fixture draws 1150w from the wall with all lights on, 1050w w/ just the Crees and l301h's. total ppf is 2950. efficacy is 2.8. Flowers a 5x5 nicely, fixture is 1.2m x 1.2m. Good co2 light also. My idea is to put flowers to sleep quickly with the far red alone, then wake them with the 660 R Crees and White L301hs. Sound plausible? I might try to schedule in some UV as a test, to illicit some more trichomes, but I'm just as likely to destroy the plastics in my tent also (fans, etc) I was hoping maybe I could run 10:10 cycles, or even a 12:10. Any thoughts?

 

[Emilya Green]

I own such a light, actually, two of them. Has three indiv controllable channels, each with own Meanwell driver. FR 720-30nm, UV (mild UV there are no decent UVB diodes on the market yet, only in tubes) and then the Cree 660s and Samsung L301h's share the largest Meanwell. The fixture is a bar light, like your tester, but has ten bars, and over 2900 diodes. To control each group automatically you need a controller 200$, but you can control them manually with switches. Fixture draws 1150w from the wall with all lights on, 1050w w/ just the Crees and l301h's. total ppf is 2950. efficacy is 2.8. Flowers a 5x5 nicely, fixture is 1.2m x 1.2m. Good co2 light also. My idea is to put flowers to sleep quickly with the far red alone, then wake them with the 660 R Crees and White L301hs. Sound plausible? I might try to schedule in some UV as a test, to illicit some more trichomes, but I'm just as likely to destroy the plastics in my tent also (fans, etc) I was hoping maybe I could run 10:10 cycles, or even a 12:10. Any thoughts?

Those do sound like amazing lights, and almost as powerful as this @Cultiuana ! I don't think your 660nm or the UV will serve to wake up the plants like the far red does. Ten minutes of far red before the big lights come on does the anti-stretch magic, but I don't think that the deep red 660's are going to do it.

On the UV, early experiments showed us that a 3 hour cycle centered in on the virtual noon hour, did best. This is just like it is in nature, and when the suns angle is the highest, the UV gets through the atmosphere. Any more UV than that seemed to degrade the trichomes and amber was triggered early.

Speaking of powerful lights, after turning the CT-720 up to full power, these plants have gone insane. The writing is on the wall... I have to move this grow over to my bigger room. Things are ok at the moment, but I need more space to really let this grow expand out and take full advantage of what this huge light is giving me.

This is going to be a 2 or maybe 3 girl project and I have sent messages to the crew that we have a big project this week... we are going to do a room swap! I am sure that they are all going to think that I am insane.

 

[ReservoirDog]

I'm not sure you've got the right end of the stick there, E...

Deep red is around 660-670 nm. Far-red, which is almost exclusively used for growing plants, is at around 730 nm, right on the edge of what the human eye can see.

 

[ReservoirDog]

Actually, I mean I assume you know that but the message is confusing me a bit...

I get that there's a number of 'red effects'

1) Emerson, 660s and 730s together are more than sum of their parts
2) 730 makes plants go nite-nite, 660 makes the wake faster
3) Is what you are claiming/referring to here, which is, that during the transition to bloom stretch can be minimized if 660's are applied 15 min. before lights on.

Is that right?

Those do sound like amazing lights, and almost as powerful as this @Cultiuana !

Also, was that a joke? I always mistake humour online.

Why don't you think the deep red 660s are going to do it? 660 is what deep red is. Thanks for suffering through this with me.

 

[Emilya Green]

I'm not sure you've got the right end of the stick there, E...

Deep red is around 660-670 nm. Far-red, which is almost exclusively used for growing plants, is at around 730 nm, right on the edge of what the human eye can see.

Exactly right... 720-730 is Far Red. On my strip, the Deep Red 660 nm lights appear to be much brighter, but they are the same wattage as the 720's on the same strip. 660's have been experimented with and have proven to be beneficial to growing plants, including studies on the Emerson effect. There has not been a lot of study regarding far red lights in the 720-730nm range, but what we do know is that there is a special quality of the far red that is unique to that range.

Actually, I mean I assume you know that but the message is confusing me a bit...

I get that there's a number of 'red effects'

1) Emerson, 660s and 730s together are more than sum of their parts
2) 730 makes plants go nite-nite, 660 makes the wake faster
3) Is what you are claiming/referring to here, which is, that during the transition to bloom stretch can be minimized if 660's are applied 15 min. before lights on.

Is that right?

Also, was that a joke? I always mistake humour online.

Why don't you think the deep red 660s are going to do it? 660 is what deep red is. Thanks for suffering through this with me.

I think that while the 660's (deep red) might help the plants wake up faster and even go to sleep faster, I think that the far red does it far more efficiently. I think that the far red alone provides for such a dramatic effect that it absolutely helps keep the plants from stretching, while I have no evidence that deep red will do the same.

I have not seen any evidence that 660 alone (deep red) does anything other than add to photosynthesis, as Dr. Bugbee found. Studies on trigger lights to put the plants to sleep and to limit stretch by rapidly waking the plants and orienting them to the horizon, as far as I know have only been done with 720 (far red) lights.

I further think that deep red should be considered to be a part of the normal CRI 100 visible spectrum. My @Cultiuana light also has a big part of that deep red included in its spectrum and probably is one of the reasons this light is loved so much by my plants. Far red however, is just one step beyond, and maybe because it is almost out of our visual spectrum it so far has been overlooked. I know this is confusing, and a year ago when I was similarly confused, I bought my trigger light strip, including both deep and far red. When I buy my next one, it will simply be far red.

 

[Emilya Green]

Today we got the big SIPs on roller carts. This is going to make this huge grow possible. Tomorrow I will spend hours in here, trimming and caging. It is also time to feed @GeoFlora Nutrients and this time they are getting the BLOOM formula. The plants have been using a phenomenal amount of water under this big @Cultiuana light, and tomorrow it is going to be time to add around 10 gallons of water to each tub. I was shocked to see how light they were when I got them on their wheels and I doubt there is more than 5 gallons in each tub at this point. We will fix that in the morning.

By the way, before someone asks: Alex is not the name of the tub, under Missouri law each plant must be labeled as to which patient that plant is going to.

Here is the other thing I am changing this weekend. This is NOT the best way to mount this light, especially if I may have to raise this light up to the ceiling because of stretch. I will be adding two more I-hooks and will hang the light from each of the 4 corners. In this shot you can see how little stretch I have gotten in this last 8 days. Stretch should not last too much longer, and if this is all they got, we are good.

This light is super bright when you are under it. My intent of this picture was not to blind you, but to show you a Before picture, before the cleanup that will happen tomorrow.

So here is what has happened. While we were cavorting around by moving plants willy-nilly and hither and yon, bloom started! Today would have been day 8 of Transition, but I am going to call it instead, Day 2 of Bloom! All 3 varieties are not quite on the same schedule, but that will be close enough to get an idea where we are at as this bloom proceeds. Here are a couple of the new little budlets, from about an hour ago.

 

[Emilya Green]

Today I got the plants squared away in the big Bloom Room. I have not re-hung the light because I need to run into town for the i-hooks, and I am being lazy. I deserve a break, because what I did do today took about 5 hours to get it all done. It was watering and feeding day, so each container got 2/3 cup of @GeoFlora Nutrients BLOOM top dressed and 1 watering pitcher from the top to drive it in and activate it. Each of the large reservoirs were filled with 5 gallons of water with Terpinator and Sweet Candy mixed in. That was the easy part.

Then I got up close and personal with each of our ladies, stripped them bare of anything not reaching the canopy and caged them up so that every major branch had support. Strawberry Lemonade was the only plant trying to get tall, and her two main colas were pinched (supercropped) about a foot down from the peak that was getting into the @Cultiuana light, and then bent down to lay mostly horizontally to match the canopy height of the rest of the room.

Here is the crate of trimmings that was removed today and is headed for the compost pile.

The view from tub height is way better than yesterday and with the added support, all the plants will be standing tall in a couple of days. We are 10 days from the flip (3 days into bloom) and stretch should be over with in 4 or 5 days. Once again, we seem to have tamed these wild plants by using the deep red light. The tomato cages have been installed around the plants where it made the most sense, and each cage is different... some have 3 legs, some 4, and for a while there was one structure that just had 2 supports. These will be re-evaluated constantly and moved or adjusted or added on to, as it seems appropriate.

This last picture is my "After" shot, to be compared to the jungle these plants were yesterday.

The roller sleds have really made this into a manageable grow. Not only can I now easily move these girls around as needed for trimming, or whatever might be needed, but I now know that there are 3 or 4 possible configurations of the tubs in the room under the big light. 2 vertical and one horizontal works well, as does 3 horizontal in a row. I also figured out the logical place to mount the far red strip, but I seem to have used all of my Velcro. I seem to be at the hardware store a lot lately and here I go again.

Lastly, the tubs were not as empty as I thought they were. 5 gallons was a good call. Much more than that would have caused runoff. All is good here in Emmie's garden and I hope it is the same at your house.

 

[Emilya Green]

Look at the lift! After cleanup, watering and feeding, the huge output of this @Cultiuana light has brought these girls to their feet! Look at them praying hard!

Tomorrow we rehang the light. Today we got the far red light strip attached and able to see the entire area under the light. A little bit of Velcro and the strip and its power supply are now firmly attached.

Here is each tub individually. All the girls are feeling pretty again.

 

[Buds Buddy]

That is precisely why I have a deep red light ready to install in there when I flip... which will be fairly soon... just waiting on my second caregiver license to be approved so I can be in bloom with more than 6 plants, and it should come through any day now. There is no sense in waiting any longer with these 3 month old clones, since it is obvious they have taken to the SIP very well. The roots must be as impressive as the plants are, above ground.

With the deep red light guiding them through stretch, it has been fairly well proven that deep red for the first 10 minutes before the @Cultiuana comes on, will keep stretch to about 60% of the present height, especially after I crank up the big light to 80% at first and then 100% as we transition to bloom. Even at 100% stretch at this point, I still have room vertically... barely.

I also like it very much that Cultiuana is watching this grow, so they can witness the effect that just deep red used as a trigger light has on this grow, to keep stretch to a minimum. I think a similar benefit could be seen regarding trichomes with switchable UV light, only running it for a few hours around noon time, and those experiments will be done over this next year as I become able to install those specialty supplemental lights in both rooms. I dream of a commercial light that has the ability to run just these banks of lights on a special circuit separate to the one that keeps entire full spectrum being lit. I had a friend who had built one of these back more than a decade ago and he called it his dial-a-light. He was way ahead of his time. Mahalo my friend, wherever you are.

Weedzer ?

 

[Emilya Green]

Weedzer ?

Exactly... Weezard

 

[Buds Buddy]

You're going to have some monsters with all that veg time.

 

[Papa OG]

@Emilya Green dang. I love to watch your progress. It's truly amazing. These ladies are spoiled! Getting all that love and affection. Maybe that's the secret.

 

[Emilya Green]

@Emilya Green dang. I love to watch your progress. It's truly amazing. These ladies are spoiled! Getting all that love and affection. Maybe that's the secret.

Hi OGpapa! think you have figured out my secret... spending a little bit of quality time with each of the girls, every day.

We made a little more progress today and got the big @Cultiuana CT-720 installed a lot better. We are presently in day 5 of bloom, or 12 days from the flip. Stretch is usually about the first 14 days after the flip, and we are just about there. I hate to think how tall these plants would have gotten without the far red trigger lights, but it appears we are out of danger. Just in time too, now that we could raise the lights all the way to the ceiling if we needed to. I will now do what I need to do to keep the plants within about a foot of the light.

I still need to get some cords off of the floor, but we are almost there, with a very professional looking Bloom Room.

 

[Emilya Green]

I saw a little bit of stretch overnight and if we see that again today, I will be moving the light up a bit. Overall, the plants look great! Today, I will do a couple of bud shots so you can see where we are at day 6 of Bloom.

 

[ReservoirDog]

Does look pro, E., perhaps because you are now!

I'm a stickler for cable management too, it's important for many big reasons but can also aesthetically make all your other hard work disappear behind a couple of crap cable runs. No, no, that'll never do.