Advice: how close am i to harvest?

[Pierre76]

Hello guys,

first time grower, first time caller ..erm.. typer..

 

I include two pictures of a Northern lights and Lemon Haze i got to grow from seeds a family member gave me so i am not 100% sure if it is actually the right veriety they told me. 

At first i struggled with the lighting and then the temperature but for the last couple of months things have been much better. Seeds germinated in December 2020. 

Info on the web says that flowering time is 10 weeks. Well mine is in flowering now for 10 weeks BUT.. i had a bar type heater in the same room as them for a few weeks and i am sure that they did not go into flowering because of the residual light from the heater for the first 4 weeks.

Now my question is two fold:

1. looking at my pictures and the forming of the buds, how long (approximately) before i can harvest? (because it does not seem like it is going to be in the next 4 weeks)

2. Are there not too much small buds where i expect it to be a large bud? i.e. should i have trimmed off more bud sites or will they merge into one giant ball???

additional info:

a. I am still feeding them nutrients and only gave them rain water since they were seedlings, hence i dont know when to flush them... 

b. picture was taken 10 days ago

Regards

 

Pierre

 

 

 

[The_StonedTrooper]

Hey Fam, welcome. 

You are growing outside, and this time the year there just isn't enough light to fatten that up properly, and you are correct in that the small buds will make up the large looking bud, but are mostly always made of small nugs.

More than 4 weeks away actually, and you not going to get much out now, unfortunately. 

[Pierre76]

Thank you for the quick response. 

I am actually growing indoor but on very limited budget so using 6500k led globes and these cheap 50w led white light grow lights you get at the chineese shops.

Will it help if i boost the light intensity now? i am one off those guys who have all the knowledge after asking DR. Googles but actually know nothing... i used my samsung s9 phone to check the lux of the lights (which i know is not so accurate) and worked out that my plants got about 50 moles light when i had them on for 24 hours a day. So in flowering i have them on 12 hours light which will then come to 25 moles per day... hmm... should i double up on lighting for the last 6 weeks???

 

 

 

[The_StonedTrooper]

Hey, if you can, boost the light yes, and maybe check out one of the suppliers on the forum for an upgrade at a later date. 

Indoor you okay, but that looks like at best to me, like week 3 to 4, and you have another 5 to 6 left then easy, with those lights.

You unfortunately cant use a phone for light output, it can read output, not the PAR or PPFD you need, or at least correctly. Those units are expensive, and the phone companies dont include such fancy stuff now days on light sensors that good.

You actually wanted the most light right now, from about week 2 onwards. When bud site are forming and so on.

[Pierre76]

Thank you, ill boost the light tomorrow. i will work on the premise that i am in week 4 of flowering and let them go another 6 weeks. ill post more picks later.

 

Thank you for the help

 

regards

 

Pierre

 

[The_StonedTrooper]

Only and best way to know when to harvest, is the Trichomes. 

You'll need to see them and judge accordingly 

[The_StonedTrooper]

Most plants, go a week or even 2 more than the breeders recommended time, for me at least. 

That last few days, makes a huge difference in end weight and product quality 

[Green Leaf Organics]

Judging from plant and leaf  structure you have at least 8 weeks left 

[Prom]

How much light you have on those plants? 

250 micromole for germination, 500 micromole for veg and 1000 for flower as guidance. Those plants will never form buds but look for more light. 

 

[Pierre76]

On 6/28/2021 at 7:35 AM, Prom said:

How much light you have on those plants? 

250 micromole for germination, 500 micromole for veg and 1000 for flower as guidance. Those plants will never form buds but look for more light. 

 

Hi Prom,

 

As it was a very difficult past year i really did not have a lot of money to spend on the right equipment. also, this was a trail run to see if i could even get them to grow, hence not knowing the strain with certainty.  i only had my trusted phone as guidance with a app testing the lux of the lights. They are all these cheap Chinese LED white grow lights with some 6500k led globes added. when taking the readings off the phone and multiplying it by 24 hours which i had them under the lights in veg, i got 52 moles per day. My reasoning was that at max, plants would get 60 moles a day in sunlight and at min you need 30moles to grow them well and even if my phone was 20 or even 40% off then i would def had been over the minimum limit. 

it worked and my plants grew well. no problems with mold or burned leaves or anything. The mistake i made was when i moved them to flowering i almost halved the light time down to 13 hours. so in my original calculations that would have taken it down to 26 moles a day... if my phone was accurate. i do not know how close am i to the real value of light intensity but i had  12 x50W off those led's over a 1.1m x 700mm area. that's about 700w/m2. over the last week i gradually increased the lights and added 10 more 50 led's and over the next 3 days i am going to add another 8x12 w 6500k globes. 

this should take my lighting back to the 52 moles a day as it was before i moved them to flowering. if this grow is successful i would like to spend some real money in buying decent items like lighting , fans and electronic measuring devices as the new generation of plants (4 x Lemon haze clones and one bubba kush cbd clone) is already 40cm high and i just took my first clones from the bubba kush today. 

is there any additional advice you could give me to ensure i at least get a half decent yield from this grow?

I thank you in advance

 

Pierre

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Prom]

Have to ask some questions back ^^

They are all these cheap Chinese LED white grow lights with some 6500k led globes added.

The Chinese produce a lot of LED full spectrum lights.. you have me a link? Why you went for the 6500 kelvin?

when taking the readings off the phone and multiplying it by 24 hours which i had them under the lights in veg, i got 52 moles per day.

What app and what readings did you get in lux/lumens? 

over the last week i gradually increased the lights and added 10 more 50 led's and over the next 3 days i am going to add another 8x12 w 6500k globes.

This is a confusing one ^^ you do that due to low on budget or for a reason. The 6500k is ranging in the blue area, you should start with those for the seedlings. And I really need to know what "50 LEDs" we talk about. 

 

When i check your pictures, a week before you took those pictures, you changed something. The plants went into a nasty stretch, that they are stressed you see on the leaves they formed, they reduced fingers.. usually I know that from light stress or fertilizer overfeeding, yours focused more on growing then anything else. 700 watts is more then enough for a 1sqm area.. is even to much. But the wrong light will not make things easier. Can you please make a picture of your light setup? And the links to those lights.. wanna see what diodes you run.

 

[Pierre76]

On 7/4/2021 at 7:32 PM, Prom said:

Have to ask some questions back ^^

They are all these cheap Chinese LED white grow lights with some 6500k led globes added.

(1.) The Chinese produce a lot of LED full spectrum lights.. you have me a link? Why you went for the 6500 kelvin?

when taking the readings off the phone and multiplying it by 24 hours which i had them under the lights in veg, i got 52 moles per day.

(2.) What app and what readings did you get in lux/lumens? 

over the last week i gradually increased the lights and added 10 more 50 led's and over the next 3 days i am going to add another 8x12 w 6500k globes.

(3.) This is a confusing one ^^ you do that due to low on budget or for a reason. The 6500k is ranging in the blue area, you should start with those for the seedlings. And I really need to know what "50 LEDs" we talk about. 

 

(4.) When i check your pictures, a week before you took those pictures, you changed something. The plants went into a nasty stretch, that they are stressed you see on the leaves they formed, they reduced fingers.. usually I know that from light stress or fertilizer overfeeding, yours focused more on growing then anything else. 700 watts is more then enough for a 1sqm area.. is even to much. But the wrong light will not make things easier. Can you please make a picture of your light setup? And the links to those lights.. wanna see what diodes you run.

 

Hi,

1. I do not have a link but i include 2 pictures of the light and the packaging. almost no info in spectrum but uses cheap 3528 chips. i also heard that 6500k is close to normal daylight but i see i was wrong and that normal daylight is closer to 5600 K.

2. app is called Lux Meter (light meter) from My Mobile tools dev. (picture included) in my veg stage i got about 22000 to 30000 lux depending on the height of the lights. the problem was converting it to u-mols/m2/s as i did not know the warmth in K of the lights.

3. 50 Led's should have read 50W led's. i once took my plants out into the sun and they got a huge shock so u wanted to up the light intensity gradually.

4. So... knowing nothing about growing canabis and having no budget to talk about i started in December last year with 4 seedlings i got from a family member. i threw a few pallets on top of each other to sit the plant on as i have back problems and need them a bit off the ground to work with them and then took another pallet and made a makeshift height adjustable platform for the lights above the plants (3rd picture attached). i started off with 3x 100W grow lights as i was told you only need one for seedling, one for veg and one for flowering..... beeeeeg surprise that that info was not correct. I ended up putting all 3 off them on the platform over 4 plants in 30 liter fabric pots.

These was the 3x100W growlights without green so the plants looked purple. As the plants grew and i opened them up i added 4x50 W while light LED's and eventually added 10x 12W 6500K globes with filter caps removed. This seemed to work well and the plants grew fantastic. After about 5 months from seed i decided to put them in flowering and reduced the time from 24 hours a day to 12 hours a day.  However, i had a 2 bar heater next to them which gave off a lot of light and coupled with now only getting 1/2 of the light per day, they struggled and would not start to flower.

Just before i put them into flowering i took clones and made a cabinet for them and covered them so that the 24 hours lighting did not reach the ones in flowering. The cold then came and i could not keep the heat in the room constant and it dropped below 16 deg C in the very beginning of winter because the room was too big. i then moved all off them to a new room a third of the size of the first room and there i could control the temp much better. up to this stage the minimum in the room was 21 deg C when we had -2 outside and it was loadshedding so the heaters and lights were off. This is where i made a fatal error. the lighting rig then passed over to the new clones and i built a cabinet for the flowering plants wit an all new hight adjustable platform , BUT, we only installed 8x50W white lights at first... then life happened and i got bust traveling the country for days on end and when i got back 3 of those lights blew and only 5 was on. so that is why the plants stretched so much in a short amount off time.. they had no light... i freaked out on my workers and fixed the 3 and added more , and more, and more to where i now have about 22 x 50W white light LED's over the 2 plants.

the problem is i can not raise the lights anymore and the plants are very close to the lights, some places less than 10cm. I made another reading tonight and at that distance my meter read 76000 lux... i dont know how to fix this.

please tell me. without me having to spend alot of money and using the stuff i have.. how do i get these plants to yield at least some sort of harvest.. even if i have to dismantle the cabinet to give the plants more space to grow.. that is just labour.. does these lights even work for this application? the white led's?? should i add more globes of a certain K (maybe 2700K??) 

Sorry for typing this much but i have put in a lot of effort and i would hate it to have wasted it because i got the wrong info in the beginning.

 

Regards

 

Pierre

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

[GGG]

Hi and welcome , by the looks of it your plants are still in veg right? Doesn't matter what the lights are or temps or anything , if the get 12/12 they will start flowering and you will notice it with in a week . If still in veg what I will do is top the plants alot , give it a week and flip to flower , they will stretch and grow closer to the light up to end of week 3 . You will get a yield with that light but not close to what you will get with good lights. Light make buds bigger and denser.
Lots of people have done what you doing , there was a time when growers only grew with CFL'S .

Sent from my Hisense Infinity H50 using Tapatalk

[Pierre76]

7 minutes ago, GGG said:

Hi and welcome , by the looks of it your plants are still in veg right? Doesn't matter what the lights are or temps or anything , if the get 12/12 they will start flowering and you will notice it with in a week . If still in veg what I will do is top the plants alot , give it a week and flip to flower , they will stretch and grow closer to the light up to end of week 3 . You will get a yield with that light but not close to what you will get with good lights. Light make buds bigger and denser.
Lots of people have done what you doing , there was a time when growers only grew with CFL'S .

Sent from my Hisense Infinity H50 using Tapatalk
 

Hello,

please don't laugh.. they have been in flowering for the last 6 weeks ( or more accurate, i set them on 12 hours a day lighting 6 weeks ago) 

attached is a picture in the 17th of june with the buds already forming (if you zoom into the picture). So either i do not know what a bud should look like , which is a good option as this is my first grow. 

Main point.. they have not been in veg for a long time now , i.e. >12hours light per day (used to give them 24hours light)

Advice pls..

 

 

[GGG]

Ok so you 6 weeks into flower then , you can lower the light a little more if there is no light burn on the highest parts , with my QB's I can go as close as 10 cm with good airflow . Drop the light 5cm and see what happens. Nothing much you can do now anyway , even if you get a good light it will help a little but not alot . Use this grow as a learning curve and a bench mark for your next grow.

Sent from my Hisense Infinity H50 using Tapatalk

[West Coast Vaper]

Can you post a pic of your cabinet from a distance.
Looks like you have a diy like myself. Maybe double check that light isn't getting in during dark time.
I also drape curtains over my cabinet just in case I missed a potential leak.

Just my 2c as I'm still a novice but I always go back to the basics and work my way from there.

Sent from my LM-X210(G) using Tapatalk

[PsyCLown]

Are these the same plants you posted pictures of towards the end of June?

 

Does not look like the bud is forming very quickly, I'd say at least another 6 weeks. Seem like very sativa dominant strains there.

 

You want a spectrum with more red in it, 3000K to 3500K when flowering. Also make sure no light leaks through during the lights off period. Curtains leak lights, you can try get the block out curtains which are a bit better but still not pitch black.

 

 

EDIT: I see the picture is from 17 June, give us a more recent picture so we can see what it looks like now and advise better.

Edited July 6, 2021 by PsyCLown

[Prom]

13 hours ago, Pierre76 said:

Hi,

1. I do not have a link but i include 2 pictures of the light and the packaging. almost no info in spectrum but uses cheap 3528 chips. i also heard that 6500k is close to normal daylight but i see i was wrong and that normal daylight is closer to 5600 K.

2. app is called Lux Meter (light meter) from My Mobile tools dev. (picture included) in my veg stage i got about 22000 to 30000 lux depending on the height of the lights. the problem was converting it to u-mols/m2/s as i did not know the warmth in K of the lights.

3. 50 Led's should have read 50W led's. i once took my plants out into the sun and they got a huge shock so u wanted to up the light intensity gradually.

4. So... knowing nothing about growing canabis and having no budget to talk about i started in December last year with 4 seedlings i got from a family member. i threw a few pallets on top of each other to sit the plant on as i have back problems and need them a bit off the ground to work with them and then took another pallet and made a makeshift height adjustable platform for the lights above the plants (3rd picture attached). i started off with 3x 100W grow lights as i was told you only need one for seedling, one for veg and one for flowering..... beeeeeg surprise that that info was not correct. I ended up putting all 3 off them on the platform over 4 plants in 30 liter fabric pots.

These was the 3x100W growlights without green so the plants looked purple. As the plants grew and i opened them up i added 4x50 W while light LED's and eventually added 10x 12W 6500K globes with filter caps removed. This seemed to work well and the plants grew fantastic. After about 5 months from seed i decided to put them in flowering and reduced the time from 24 hours a day to 12 hours a day.  However, i had a 2 bar heater next to them which gave off a lot of light and coupled with now only getting 1/2 of the light per day, they struggled and would not start to flower.

Just before i put them into flowering i took clones and made a cabinet for them and covered them so that the 24 hours lighting did not reach the ones in flowering. The cold then came and i could not keep the heat in the room constant and it dropped below 16 deg C in the very beginning of winter because the room was too big. i then moved all off them to a new room a third of the size of the first room and there i could control the temp much better. up to this stage the minimum in the room was 21 deg C when we had -2 outside and it was loadshedding so the heaters and lights were off. This is where i made a fatal error. the lighting rig then passed over to the new clones and i built a cabinet for the flowering plants wit an all new hight adjustable platform , BUT, we only installed 8x50W white lights at first... then life happened and i got bust traveling the country for days on end and when i got back 3 of those lights blew and only 5 was on. so that is why the plants stretched so much in a short amount off time.. they had no light... i freaked out on my workers and fixed the 3 and added more , and more, and more to where i now have about 22 x 50W white light LED's over the 2 plants.

the problem is i can not raise the lights anymore and the plants are very close to the lights, some places less than 10cm. I made another reading tonight and at that distance my meter read 76000 lux... i dont know how to fix this.

please tell me. without me having to spend alot of money and using the stuff i have.. how do i get these plants to yield at least some sort of harvest.. even if i have to dismantle the cabinet to give the plants more space to grow.. that is just labour.. does these lights even work for this application? the white led's?? should i add more globes of a certain K (maybe 2700K??) 

Sorry for typing this much but i have put in a lot of effort and i would hate it to have wasted it because i got the wrong info in the beginning.

 

Regards

 

Pierre

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Buying in China makes sense, when you know exactly what you wanna buy.. otherwise, they sell you ANYTHING as awesome grow lights, even the diodes are prehistoric. Honesty is not the Chinese main sales argument.

That is enough light and if you added 6500k or not, shouldn't have mattered to much. Enough light.. just old, I would say is a SMD3528 on the 50 watt panels. Way less effective as the LM301B / H range. The Chinese know that fact too.. they just buy the cheap old material and turn in into "awesome grow lights". Nothing wrong with those lights, the tech is just very old. When ever you buy a light these days, check that the diodes are perfectly square.. if not, old technology.

Your plants are confused.. and I agree with the guys before.. sit in your grow space during day time... you might need a hand to close up from outside.. and see if you are sitting in the pitch black.. if there is light coming in, patch those spots.. pitch black, nothing else works.

And as @PsyCLown mentioned before, actual picture, need to see how they look now. nearly a month old pictures not helping ^^

Edited July 6, 2021 by Prom
typo.. has more ^^

[Pierre76]

5 hours ago, PsyCLown said:

Are these the same plants you posted pictures of towards the end of June?

 

Does not look like the bud is forming very quickly, I'd say at least another 6 weeks. Seem like very sativa dominant strains there.

 

You want a spectrum with more red in it, 3000K to 3500K when flowering. Also make sure no light leaks through during the lights off period. Curtains leak lights, you can try get the block out curtains which are a bit better but still not pitch black.

 

 

EDIT: I see the picture is from 17 June, give us a more recent picture so we can see what it looks like now and advise better.

this is a picture from yesterday. they are growing into the lights..

[Pierre76]

4 hours ago, Prom said:

Buying in China makes sense, when you know exactly what you wanna buy.. otherwise, they sell you ANYTHING as awesome grow lights, even the diodes are prehistoric. Honesty is not the Chinese main sales argument.

That is enough light and if you added 6500k or not, shouldn't have mattered to much. Enough light.. just old, I would say is a SMD3528 on the 50 watt panels. Way less effective as the LM301B / H range. The Chinese know that fact too.. they just buy the cheap old material and turn in into "awesome grow lights". Nothing wrong with those lights, the tech is just very old. When ever you buy a light these days, check that the diodes are perfectly square.. if not, old technology.

Your plants are confused.. and I agree with the guys before.. sit in your grow space during day time... you might need a hand to close up from outside.. and see if you are sitting in the pitch black.. if there is light coming in, patch those spots.. pitch black, nothing else works.

And as @PsyCLown mentioned before, actual picture, need to see how they look now. nearly a month old pictures not helping ^^

 

The picture i added on the original text was a picture of yesterday. the pic off the lights were a month old

 

[PsyCLown]

Those plants seem confused... They should have stopped forming new leaves, should have stopped growing in height a while ago.

I have never had this happen to me, I suspect it might be due to the plants not getting pitch black darkness and they're in a limbo state.

 

When are your lights on for (what time to what time) and then when are they off for? 

[Ill_Evan]

4 minutes ago, PsyCLown said:

Those plants seem confused...

Kinda looks like they revegging neh?

I'd check for light leaks during lights off period. 

[PsyCLown]

Kinda looks like they revegging neh?
I'd check for light leaks during lights off period. 

Yeah, thinking the same...

Issue with the plants not getting enough darkness for 12 hours.

Sent from my Redmi Note 7 Pro using Tapatalk

[GGG]

Looks like you have one finger leaves and that a sign that they confused and started vegging again , only reason why they are one finger.

Sent from my Hisense Infinity H50 using Tapatalk

[Pierre76]

Thank you guys.. it must be light leaking in. i will move them tomorrow to a dedicated room that can be pitch black. i will post pictures in a weeks time to see if things got better.

 

@PsyCLown the light are off from 17h00 to 05h00.