Not a lot of flower matter :(

3 gal pots are big enough for most plants, and 600w HID + the CFL's should be more than enough....What are your temps and humidity ?

 

How long did you veg for? How many plants?

 

You have enough light so the only other things that would cause airy buds are nutrition problems or more likely too much heat.

 

Sometimes it's a strain by strain thing.

My last short grow, same exact equipment and conditions, I had a Big Bud in there, a Dion Warwick, and a Cherry Pie.

Big Bud put out buds that were medium sized and density compared to the other two. Warwick put out HUGE, but loose buds. Cherry Pie were tiny sticky rocks. Dry yield was about the same from each plant by weight. Ran through the grinder, about the same volume resulted.

 

They were underfed by the sound of things

 

If you topped an auto, maybe it responded by just not bothering that hard.  Nothing really stands out as being a clear cut reason that I can see.  Could the unlucky with the seed and you got the runt of the batch, maybe you were needing them not enough or the wrong kind of balance, could be they were stressed at some point and that just held everything back.
 
They do kind of look like a CFL grow though, I can definitely understand your disappointment.  Your tent is actually very large, 27 sq ft, if you were trying to light all of the space with the 600w you must have had it quite high, maybe it's a question of light intensity.  600w over that space is only 22 watts/sqft when the whole point of having hid lighting is to get you 50-70 watts/sqft  (I'm not counting the CFLs because they emit like 10x fewer lumens than you 600w hid and if they are more than about 8 inches from any of your plants they are almost pointless)

 

Grrr....light diffusing, howando. watts per sq foot not a good measurement.

23/100 CFL, at 3 feet is PRECISELY 75% of what it is at 1 foot (which is around 66.17% of what you get at industry standard measurement of 1 inch).

Lot of wiggle room in there when changing scales...it's an inverse square by the scale. Change scales by a big enough factor, there are discrepancies, but we'll ignore them, currently.

1 lux is 1 lumen per sq meter of coverage (usually at 1 meter from emitter). In essence, you've already had a nearly 60% fall off in intensity on a surface a meter away compared to the measurement at industry standard 1 inch. Put a light meter under it (with no reflectors), you're getting about 960 lux...I tend to use "lumens" simply because with angular considerations and the fact leaves vary in distance from emitter, it's easier for me to think that way, but the principle is there.

Anyhow...if you get 960 lumens per square meter at 1 meter...at two meters (about 6 feet), you get 75% of that (you shifted scales to meters), or 720 lux. At 3 meters, you get only 72.3% of the light you got at 1 meter (694.08 lux).

Since scientific standard is 1 meter, you lose greater than 19% between the increment between zero and one...basically, at half a meter, using round numbers, you lost about 12.5% between bulb and surface, at 1 meter, an additional 7%, for 19.5%, at 2 meters, an additional 4.5%, or 25% from emitter.

That's visual description, not accurate numbers, in the last.

So bulb distance is a BIG issue. If your CFL is 2 inches from the plant, it's delivering plus or minus 75% of the light it does at 1 inch, for practical purposes. At 18 inches, only 65.8% what it did at 1 inch. That's 160 "lumens" difference. Or the difference between a 75 watt and a 100 watt incandescent bulb in a room, in effect (again, not exact, just for illustration, on the incandescent comparison).

 

Reflectors DO modify this a bit, as howando is about to remind me <grin>

 

What breeder and strain auto is this? And do you have a picture of the plants mature before being cut down?

 

I unleashed the wrath!
 
What you have to bear in mind is people, especially on the newbie forum, benefit from straight-forward answers and rules-of-thumb to get them started or through their immediate problem.  They may not be "correct" strictly speaking, but they are helpful.
 
So watts/sqft is totally meaningless, it has no bearing whatsoever.  I could have a powerful light that has no usable wavelengths whatsoever (and now we bring PAR into a discussion already complicated by lumens, lux, flux and inverse square laws) so the fact that I have 100w/sqft is meaningless.  CFLs produce way way 'less light' (keep your hat on ) so you can't use this kind of rule of thumb to compare CFL and HID setups.
 
But looking at all HID-only setups, without measuring the actual light from each bulb, you can roughly compare them on terms of watts per sq feet.  If you have large space you need more lighting power, usually a bigger light which is more watts, which results in the watts/sqft ratio being roughly maintained.
 
So if the situation is that the 600w cool tube is fitted right at the top of the 2m tent, I can say well all that power is spread out over all that area, there's little power per unit of area, little power per plant, little light per plant.  It's a consequence of the maths and stuff you quote, but it's more of an intuitive way of looking at it for rough comparison.
If I have a 60cm square tent but still have the lamp 2m high, you're right that the distance to plant is still the same so the fact I can now quote 150watts/sqft is not an improvement in the situation.  if anything it is telling you things will get too hot, but the plants on the ground wont actually get any more direct light than before unless you move the lamp closer (lets ignore reflected light).
 
By moving the lamp closer, you reduce the area effectively covered by the lamp, and so increase the power-area ratio.  Again it's a consequence of working out the numbers not the other way around, but the general rule is good enough, the plants get more light because they're closer to the bulb.  It's not a rule, it's not the truth, but it's a useful rough check to compare two areas using similar lighting systems.  The assumptions are, though, that we are trying to cover the entire space not a sub-section of it.
 
It's good enough for me to suspect that if you have a 600w bulb in a 5'x5'x6' tent and the plants look under developed, it is because you don't have sufficient light intensity on the plants.

 

Looks like a combination of not enough light and nutrients. That 600W is pretty small for a 27 square foot tent, that's only like 22W a foot which is less than what I veg my plants with. You want to be at least at the 50W/f mark even though as mentioned above its not the "best" to go by, but in that tent you need to double or triple that lighting up at the least if you want tight buds

Up your nutes and light and maybe don't too autos and you'll see a way better harvest next round