It sure does help, thanks! So I'll use SC until my plants are tall enough to go through the screen and then I'll just tuck the branches under.

I've read a few times that the best time to flip to 12/12 is when your screen is filled to about 60% capacity. Maybe SME can pitch in on this.

How long did you veg in your first scrog grow before switching to flower? And did you defoliate the area UNDER the screen to help with airflow? Or left it as it is? I don't believe in defoliation as a technique to boost yields but I've seen it suggested many times that defoliating the area under the screen helped increase airflow under the canopy and that the leaves wouldn't be getting any light anyway so there was no sense in keeping them.

I don't ever remove leaves unless they are on a branch that is being pruned. They don't seem to impede air flow much, and they act as a reservoir that the plant will tap into if it falls short of mobile nutrients.

I'm no trained botanist, but as I understand it plants exchange gas via the stomata located on the underside of the leaves. So, removing leaves might reduce a plant's ability to "breathe" thereby slowing its metabolic rate. Just a hypothesis.

Switching to 12/12 when 60% of the screen is covered seems like a reasonable starting point. I think I started at about 40% coverage on my first SCROG run and that seemed a little inadequate. One thing to note is that I'm not vegging with the screen. I have limited veg space (hence the DIY veg tent idea...) so I've been vegging 2 plants up at a time with just a lollipop and top when they get big enough. I train them into the 4-branch configuration, then I mount the screen over them when I put them in my flower room. Seems to be working so far.

Here's a pic of my second SCROG run from a few weeks ago. This was about week 6, no co2, and I had vegged it to cover about 50% of the screen. As you can see it covered the screen well after early-flower stretch, but I think that the canopy might be too thin to squeeze every drop of performance out of my light. Still, we're looking at ~14oz there, and 2 of these will fit under each 1kw light.

The run after that has a taller canopy, so we'll see how that turns out too.



Note the fan leaves down below. Very minimal air flow restriction. You may encounter more air restriction if you use what I refer to as an "octopus" type training method (less pruning, more training) rather than my preferred 4-branch method (hack and slash until it looks like a table).

Thanks a lot for that pic beef, I'm very visual so it was great.

A pound per plant certainly sounds awesome

Love the wheel system too.

btw that's a 7.8 gallon bucket. The screen measures 2ftx4ft. Not so helpful for those of us using the metric system...

2x4 is exaclty the space I have right now so this is what my canopy should look like.

I wonder, how tall above the screen will the plants grow? I know it must change from strain to strain and how long you waited until you flipped to tower, but if I flip at 60% fill, can I expect it will stay under 3 feet tall above the screen?

They can grow to the ceiling if you give them enough time, but the light can only penetrate so far. This is especially true in late flower, when dense buds blot out the light for anything down below. So, it's a game of trying to veg just enough so that the plants stretch just enough in flower to give you a nice full canopy, but few loose "popcorn" buds near the bottom.

In my experience 1000w HPS bulbs will produce about 8" of really dense canopy, and anything below that will turn out a little loose and leafy (YMMV). With that observation in mind, I've been trying to make a solid table of buds 8" thick all the way across my screens (with appropriate space for foliage). However, I'm also thinking about the pros/cons of thinning out the vertical branches that come through the screen in an attempt to create a taller forest of large colas rather than a table of relatively small ones. I don't know which method will produce more, so we'll just have to try them both to find out.

Another thing to consider is "lumber"-to-bud ratio. I know, this sounds kinda silly, but I've grown some big plants with a ton of branches that yielded mostly stem and leaf. With a little better training/pruning the same strains became reasonably good yielders. IME learning how to train and prune for yield is one of the more difficult stepping stones for a beginning grower.

I'm sure SME isn't far behind me with his red pen, but that's my experience.

OK I realized by looking at other Kali Mist grow journals my leaves were way too dark. So I added CalMg and they changed color in a day. What clued me in were the copper-colored spots. Checked out Mr Rosenthal's book and sure enough, it mentions how hydro grows that use RO water may get a Ca deficiency.

It's great how quickly the plant reacts to changes in the reservoir. It's great feedback for the noob grower.

Your leaves were too dark, you added calmag, then they got lighter?

want pics

Looked greener under the flashlight, I'll know for sure tomorrow under color balanced flash after import on my PC.

I would FIM first then LST/supercrop if I were going to SCROG. Since that's not my style though, I can't really say with any certainty what works best. My guess on the screen/veg/flower thing would be in the 60-70% range.

I'd disagree, to some degree, that a 1000w HPS only penetrates 8" well but I couldn't put an exact number on it either. I think that some of that could be subjective so I'm not really arguing the point, just that my perception might be different.

I think the style/size/number of plants thing is less relevant than the genetics/environmental/coverage thing when it comes to yield. I grew *DWC "trees" in the past and I understand what you mean about growing lumber, which is also the part of the theory behind SOG. It's just one of those preference things where pros and cons are weighed and decisions are made. There is no one right way to grow.

Watch adding too much magnesium, it can lock out other nutrients including calcium...and vice-versa. One of the best guides to nutrient problems that I ever saw was on the old overgrow forums. When that died it was saved by one of the members. Since I really don't want to post links, due to the spamtards, just search for "Grow Marijuana FAQ, Cannabis cultivation - marijuana growing tips & photos" and you'll find it. Other similar guides were based on that one, now some may be better but I still like the old one.

YMMV...