Nirvana Blue Mystic and Northern Lights - Feminized - 600w MH/HPS conversion - LST w/Cloning - Soil

It has been a few days since the girls have been placed under the 600w MH light, and they are looking really good. The plants seem to be happy so far and they grow a little bit every day. I am pretty sure that I have one of both strains, so this older thread should suit my needs just fine as I document these girls growing up.
 
Same as the last couple times I grew these strains, Blue Mystic has the huge fat Indica leaves and Northern Lights has slightly thin/slim hybrid looking leaves. I trimmed just two blades off of a leaf on the Northern Lights plant so that the lower branches get better light. Trying to nudge the lower branch sites into starting to get bigger so that I can do a little LST next week or so, and then I made a big screen to do a SCROG type of grow. Northern Lights does great SCROG, going to try with the Blue Mystic as well and see how that goes.
 
Since I am down to 5 total seeds feminized seeds of these two strains, I want to clone like mad on this run. If I can get one of each to take and keep it in veg for a bit, I can clone as many plants as I have room for. The clones will be kept in a flower station upstairs away from the 12/12 cycle that I will be switching to in about a month or so.
 
Picture 1- Overview of the light and the plants- Does this distance look alright? My light just has an adjustable wing reflector, nothing fancy...but the plants aren't showing any signs of heat stress or anything.
 
Picture 2- Both girls with my totem watchers who always keep an eye on them! The buckets have drainage on the bottoms as well as the sides, I like to poke some holes in the sides to aid in getting a little extra oxygen to the roots. It might not even be enough to help, just an old habit I picked up to try to encourage plant health.
 
Picture 3- Blue Mystic from above. She's got those fat Indica leaves going, I love how this strain looks and I am pretty excited because this is the first plant I've had so far that hasn't had any freaky mutations. Something may eventually come to light, but so far she's got all her leaves and nodes where they should be.
 
Picture 4- Blue Mystic from the side, showing how much space is between nodes. The plants I grew before had a huge thick main stem with lots of space between the nodes. Northern Lights is more compact and branchy.
 
Picture 5- Blue Mystic close up of the top of the plant. The newest leaves have the blue hue going on at the tips, it hasn't been cold or anything down the basement so it is just the plant expressing some color other than regular green.
 
Northern Lights pictures are on the bottom:
 
Picture 6- Northern Lights from above. I only removed a couple blades off of the one leaf to get some light to the bottom branches. This grow I am going to just bend leaves to achieve getting light where I want it to go instead of removing leaves like I did last grow. I used to grow the plants in a spiral pattern, removing one leaf at each node so that the lower bud sites got light, but I am going to stop doing that and let nature take its course this time and see how much better that works out for me.
 
Picture 7- Northern Lights from the side where the lower branches are getting extra light to speed up growth for the SCROG later on.
 
 
Thanks for checking this out, I am pretty excited to get some plants going again!

 

I have a fan that oscillates past the plants, hitting them with a gentle breeze to strengthen the main stems. I also have a dehumidifier running so that the air stays on the dry side instead of getting really humid. As you can see from the first picture above, moisture used to be a problem in my basement and when we get a heavy rain sometimes I would get a bit of a flood but I have done some work to prevent that from happening again I just need to paint my walls with Drylock again this spring to seal it up from the inside. I fixed my gutter system, it wasn't draining properly and water would pool behind my house that seeped into the corners of the basement.
 
I also just hooked up a vent that blows fresh air in from outside, I haven't had to turn it on yet but it is in place and will help keep the air fresh down in the basement. The air used to get very humid, stale, and heavy but now that shouldn't be a problem anymore. I think the last couple grows really suffered from the air not being fresh enough for something living constantly in the basement. I looked carefully at all the issues that came up during my last 2 indoor grows, came up with fixes to the problems, and fixed as much as I could so now things should be rockin'!
 
On a side note I was testing out all 4 of my light bulbs the other day before I put the seedlings under them and my spare HPS bulb was dead from the factory right out of the box. Bummer, but I did order the whole kit off of Amazon for about $150 so no big deal. The kit came with one MH bulb plus one HPS, and then I bought an extra MH and HPS bulb from the company (iPower). They are some kind of generic Chinese made lamps lol so I guess that I got what I paid for although the digital dimmable ballast has not had any problems at all so far and I am pretty happy with the finished product that I got the light to produce through one and a half grows. It has been over a year since I bought everything, I don't know about their return policy but I can't even find the invoices they sent me with the light kit or the spare bulbs, so I will just have to pick up a spare bulb somewhere else. I think I will get a couple more bulbs somewhere else and try to get some higher quality bulbs once I have the extra money.
 
I just don't want to start flowering with one HPS bulb, that is a recipe for disaster. Nothing like coming home from a long day of work to find out that your garden has been in the dark all day! Always keep a spare bulb or preferably two on hand.
 
I am currently working out a design for the flowering chamber so I can paint the walls white to reflect some light and get the most out of every watt that I am burning up. As it is now there is just one wall by my temporary veg station on the tables that I set up, and painting it white isn't really going to help much because the plants aren't that close to the wall. I'm starting to draw up some designs for a flowering station and I'll have something in place by the time that I switch over to 12/12.
 
I want to build a hell of a setup so that I can keep growing for a long time in this spot. It has been pretty good to me so far.