Get a harvest every 2 weeks

This is a typical 'Sea of Green' or SoG op. Clones receive zero veg time; once they have a good set of roots, they go in to flower.

This diagram shows the flow of plants through the op:



You can build this op in any scale you like, from a single mother and just one plant put in to the flowering area every two weeks up to as big as your needs require.

The idea is to grow only the top cola of a naturally growing plant with none of the lower branches and the small buds those branches produce. All branching, pretty much everything on the lower 1/3 of the plant, is snipped off in about wk 2 & 3.



Plant at 6 wks flowering, note lower branching is removed

The method of putting clones in to flower with no vegging time keeps plants relatively short, to about 33-36" (~1 metre), which better suits artificial lighting.

Even powerful HPS lighting can only penetrate foliage so deeply, so a metre tall is just about perfect. I find that big lights give better bud density, so I use two 1000W HPS, one over each pair of 820mm^2 (~2.7 feet^2) flood trays.

The mums are maintained under 24 hour 400W HPS. HPS is used as the 400 was the flowering light some 7-8 years ago and was spare after the 1000s were installed in the flowering area. It works fine in this application, so I never changed it to MH, but I'm planning to buy a MH-HPS conversion lamp for the mums soon. The clonebox has 6x 18W fluoro tubes (24"), usually on 24/7 but shut off for the first 6-8 hours after doing a new batch of cuttings.

Clones go straight from the clonebox into the flowering area- no vegging required. They grow a little bit vegetatively for the first 3-4 weeks but then stop getting taller in wk4 and start making bud weight.

I keep about 6-10 mothers and do about 30 cuttings every 2 weeks from them. I choose the best 20-23 clones to be put in the 4-tray flowering area.

Leftover clones become replacement mothers or are discarded. Mothers are replaced one by one, about every 4-8 weeks as needed.

As each batch of clones goes in to tray #1, a batch comes out of tray #4 to be harvested, every 2 weeks.


Tray #1, wk0-2
(plants pictured are at 2 weeks flowering)


Tray #2, wk2-4
(plants pictured are at 4 weeks flowering)


Tray #3, wk4-6
(plants pictured are at 6 weeks flowering)


Tray #4, wk6-8
(plants pictured are at 8 weeks flowering)

The mother vegging area is in the same room with the flowering plants, but has a lightproof curtain (just a double layer of panda film, looped over a 2x4 screwed to the ceiling, white sides toward plants) to prevent interrupting the flowering plants' lightcycle and has its own ventilation system as well.

Each tray in both the veg & flower areas has its own pump, reservoir tank and timer, allowing the watering rate and nute mix to be tailored to the plant for vegging as well as for each 2 week phase of flowering.

See also my photoessay on cloning in rockwool.

 

Thanks for that.

My use of SoG isn't terribly novel but staggering the feed to every 2 weeks and the use of 1 tray per 2-week phase isn't something I've seen done elsewhere- someone will surely have seen it done before, though.

Incidentally, the pots are common 8" dia x 8" tall black plastic types with drain holes, about 50 cents each from a dollar shop. Pots are stuffed with loose rockwool floc. The pot drain holes are sufficiently small to keep rockwool from falling out but plenty big enough to let water in when the trays are flooded. Pots of rockwool hold about 2L of water each; they only require flooding 1x day. I only flood to about 50mm, not to the full depth of the overflow tube. This is managed with digital timers. Each pump has its own timer and can be set for as short a runtime as I like. Different pumps may require more or less time to flood to 50mm and are programmed accordingly.

Nutes are Canna Flores Substra and Vega Substra with Canna PK-13-14 added per instructions in wk3. Flowering tanks are run at 1400ppm, pH5.3-5.8. Tank 4 (for wk6-8) can be run on plain pH adjusted water if desired to flush nutes from the plants, but I usually run nutes in it anyway. I can't detect any smoking quality difference either way. Mother tank gets run a little stronger, 1800-2000ppm @ 5.3-5.8.

Pathogen control is by H2O2, 50% horticultural grade added to all tanks every 3-4 days at 1ml/litre of tank volume.

 

Sure- each batch of 21-23 plants yields 13-16oz, sometimes more.

This room is sorta new though I've been running an op like this for about 10 years. I've just done a total rebuild a few months ago in a new location, which has required tweaking in some conditions. I've just made some improvements (new exhaust blower, bigger intake ducting) which should keep temps more stable, increasing the avg yield. I expect the next harvest to be closer to 20-23oz.

They can be flowered as soon as there's a good spray of roots as shown:


(day 12 after cutting)

As long as a clone has several taproots showing (not just 1-2), it is ready to flower.

I don't veg the clones at all (outside of the time they spend on the mother plant and in the clonebox under fluoros), so they will not be any bigger when ready to flower than when they were cut from the mums about 12 days before.

 

You're too right- SoG does rely on high numbers of small plants. If your laws are real heavy on plant counts, SoG may not be for you.

The per-plant yields are relatively small in SoG but you're growing only top colas, the densest bud yielding part of the plant and more tops per sq ft than you can grow by any other means. That's what brings the yields up.

This op could do much better if I were to get rid of the rockwool/flood system and replace it with NFT or an aero system based on large PVC drainpipes, something which puts more O2 in the roots- both are on my 'upcoming decisions' list.

I love the simplicity and reliability of the flood/rockwool system and the mobility of plants within the op, tho I could do without buying and disposing of the media.

 

Thanks, g_g.

I'm not sure I'll do a running grow journal- after all, I'm a frickin' lazy stoner. Thanks for asking, anyway.

SoG lets you grow only the best part of the plant and do so with fairly good floorspace efficiency. SCRoG would be more floorspace and light efficient, but it's a LOT more work and time is invested in vegging plants which are to be flowered.

I've organised this SoG on production line principles. While they don't necessarily have to be moved, I do move the plants from tray to tray during their stay in the flowering area. Gives me a chance to clean trays and inspect, prune or spray plants (occasional powdery mildew, less common with recent exhaust blower and intake upgrades) if they need it.

On the production line theme, I've also built a bud dryer which runs at very low temps (29C) compared to food dehydrators. Takes about 3 days from manicured to smoking, no crispy/crumbly, no chlorophyll scent. Will be writing a separate post about that soon.

 

Thanks, willydog.

Yes, I know it's a rhetorical, whimsical comment... but it seems to me like you'd have 1/4 of your life left. You could be scared half-to-death quite a number of times. How many times can you divide something in half?

 

If all the flowering trays (23 ea max), the mother tray (10 max) and the clonebox (30 max) are totally full, there's 132 plants. Yep, that could surely be a legal problem, more serious in some localities than others.

Vegging and immature flowering plants don't make much smell. It's the buggers in tray #4, in wks 6-8 which really get whiffy. I have a UV ioniser running in the space and am presently cooking up a seriously ballsy ioniser with 5x 20W UV tubes for the exhaust duct. I'm trying to avoid a carbon filter as I would prefer not to have the flow restriction of a filter in the ventilation system. Works pretty well right now without a filter but for a few days near the end of wk8 in tray 4, I'll admit there's a scent problem I could work on. That's on today's to-do, BTW. Waiting on some UV tubes and ballasts from an electrical supplier.

However, one way to keep scents down a little is to not dick around with flowering plants much. Disturbing the plants by touching the buds, knocking the plants against one another, etc. will break a few resin trichomes open and release their perfume.

 

Thanks, mon. I think I'm getting the best I can out of 2kW and a flood system for the effort I'm prepared to put in.

Keeps working, too- who says there's no magic puddings? Just add water and electricity.

 

Yep, I've been using a bud dryer for years. There's a FAQ entry on it over here on rollitup.

However, I have recently fully rebuilt the thing. Version 2.0 needs a couple of tweeks before it's ready for primetime, as it were. When I get that done, I'll do an updated post.

 

The 400HPS over the mums has been replaced with a metal halide retro-conversion lamp. Rather cheap, make sure you shop around. We'll see how we go.

I have got before and after cuttings pix of the mums as they were while vegging under the 400HPS. I'll try to document any differences under the MH as they happen.