Like i said, go to google play and get a lux meter for your phone. It only measures the visible spectrum but it still gives you an idea of how much light the plants are getting. Try to keep it around 45,000 lux in full veg and at least 84,000 in bloom. As for what the other guy was saying, do not lollipop those plants. (Unless you really want to for some reason) Knowing your setup and what you want to do, "lollipopping" would be one of the dumbest things for you to do. Im sure the OP is happy growing their plant just to rip everything except the top few buds off (if you have hydro and know what youre doing, youll get WAY more yield from the manifolding/scrog training i was telling you about. Just make sure that any of the tiny nodes at the bottom that wont be anything worth while, snip them off so the plant doesnt waste energy on them. Look up the "manifolding" technique by nebula. Manifold the plants and put them under the screen. Perfect. What i suspect most people call lollipopping is really just lazy, half assed manifolding. Below are 2 pics, the first is of a plant being lollipopped and the second is of manifolding. Choose the one that fits your grow/preference
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With manifolding you get a nice amount of buds while still keeping the plant short, bushy and uniform. The idea of lollipopping seems a waste to me, why veg a plant for 2 months just to strip the bottom 3/4 of the plant bare
. Why do that when you can manifold and get that plant ready to flower like that in 3 or 4 weeks. As you can tell, im heavily biased against lollipopping. I know about the "amazing yields" people get but im not convinced. That same strain/pheno, treated in all the same ways would yield way higher if it was manifolded. Or at the very least it would yield at least the same in half the veg time. Like i said, use whichever one suits you best.
You should be checking your pH way more often or else it could crash down to 4.0 in a day and the plants would be dying before you knew anything was wrong bud. I like 5.8 oh and as far as the OP being stable at 550ppm 2 months in, im going to guess thats still in veg? 550ppm seems low for flowering, unless you just switched. Or you have finicky strains. Or if they have just been over fed and you need to be gentle now. Having said all that, some strains do like lower nutes in flower and i dont know anything about the OPs grow. He was absolutely right about the leaves laying on top of each other though, you really dont want.
As for the UV light, at the end of week 4 i turn 1 small one on (a little 2 footer), just to give them some UV until the last 2 weeks of flower, then i turn the other 2 big ones on (4 feet each)
@Cashmeh im not trying to bash your grow style or anything like that, its just that in Dazed's setup, that is definitely not the most efficient use if space and grow time. If you have good success lollipopping (and youre not just doing it because its relatively new and someone on the internet said its better so it MUST be.) Then i am glad youve had success. However, i have done both methods side by side with clones from the same mom so identical genetics. Manifolding with scrog yielded 20% more in half the time compared to the lollipop. If you havent tried this yet, i suggest you do and see what youve been missing. Think about it, half the veg time also means you can get 2 extra cycles in per year (if you keep rotating cycles back to back, dont waste time, and have plants that flower in less than 12 weeks.
Anyways, this is it for my massive message this time Dazed
. Let me know what you think and which way you want to go and ill help you do it as best as i can. ✌
DwJ
P.S. if you want to manifold, you should top it for the first time once it has about 3 nodes. As a favor to me, can you read nebulas manifolding tutorial so i dont have to explain it all and take pics and all that? Thanks. Ill talk to you later bro.