supporting heavy buds and branches

[smokestack23]

Hey,

OK...I have some plants in my DIY RDWC system. They're 6 days into flowering and are in 5gal pails. They won't stop exploding all over the place and this strain is a very heavy yielder.
I'm drawing nothing but blanks in trying to come-up with some way to cage them in. It's winter and I couldn't find any tomato cages so I bought some large hex mesh (like chickenwire with big holes in it). Problem is, I don't know whatthehell I should do with it.
I want to support both the branches and the plants themselves. I induced them at 24" and they're over 35" tall and about 38" wide already and they're just in like the middle of the stretch. I'm gonna have snapping branches and falling over plants in a month.
Anyone got any cool ideas or plans for something? I'd like to be able to still access the plants...and roots if necessary which means lifting them out of the pails.

HELP!!!

 

[ibTheMan]

tomato cages r my favorite, but ones with ah big diameter like 18"+ inchs.

 

[Lost]

Hey smokestack! You want to cut off about a foot or so of the legnth off the zip tie the long ends together. You should end up with a 4 foot tall cage with about a 3 foot diameter. Just get them in early!

 

[smokestack23]

Thanks for the replies.
Maybe I'm trying to overcomplicate things? Do do you guys mean to just leave the cages on the floor or attach them to the bucket lids somehow? I'd like to be able to remove the bucket lids to get at the roots...well..hopefully I wont have reason to but...
Here's what I've got goin on.

I have 2-4 plant systems a month apart (15 plant permit). Right now I only have one loaded and the other will get plants in 3 weeks so I can harvest about a month apart. 8 plants in flower (total) with four rooted and vegging plus 2 or 3 mothers. I'm already forseeing problems with roots filling and plugging the fivers so the second 4 unit system is getting changed to tubs as we speak. I KNOW I'm gonna have to move these four into the tubs. These biatches are going CRAZY. I've been growing for a lot of years and hydro isnt new to me but...I've never grown trees like this and I've NEVER seen growth like this...EVER...ANYWHERE....EVER!!!

So yeah so...I'd really like to somehow cage them now but somehow have the cages integral to the netlids so that I can open them, move them, or at least, get at the roots, drains, airstones...

Oh and just to be clear...they're like 36" ABOVE the pails..not 36" tall from the floor.

Thanks again.

 

[Mr. Greenthum]

tomato cages!

 

[smokestack23]

You guys must live in more temperate climates...or at least bigger towns than I.

Right now we have about a thousand feet of snow on the ground. Every hardware store has shovels and snowblowers in their seasonal departments. Tomato cages are a few months away still :(

Reminds me of something though. I've lived in countries that have summer in the winter (not below the equator...just Mexico and stuff...). I noticed that in their stores they have summer stuff for sale all year. Poor bastards. Up here they're constantly changing their inventory setting-up for the next seasonal rush. You know...right after the "back to school" sales the shovels and Christmas deco come out. Good LUCK trying to find a pair of winter gloves, boots, shovels...AFTER the first snowfall. Everything's sold-out. Springtime comes along and out come the rakes and spades and nursery plants. Again...sold-out within a few weeks...then the lawnmowers and weed and feed, innertubes, dinggys, sprinklers...Then the fall and more rakes, leaf blowers, on and on...then the winter stuff comes back out.

Each change of season causes another consumerism boom. The stores (mostly big corporate chains) RAKE (no pun intended) it IN. Man it would be nice to just need the odd new pair of shorts, sandals and shades every year...oh..and tomato cages.

So...I'm still stumped. I guess I'll just have to make something work.
Thanks for the replies everyone.

 

[half baked]

was gonna say the same as lost but if u have any spare canes weave them down through the mesh for extra rigidity and just nip a lil V shape in the top of each cane for the mesh to hook onto. hb

 

[smokestack23]

Damn you UK guys have some funny words..lol. Cane? I get it though. That's a great idea. I'm gonna take it and run with it. I'm going to try to somehow make them attached to the lids.
I KNEW there had to be a very simple answer that I was overlooking. Thanks hb.

Now...back to you guys and your funny English. You invented the shit. You speak the "Queen's" English...yet you guys can't figure out how to pronounce ER when it's at the end of a word....BUT...when it's a vowel at the end of a word..THEN you can say ER...like, British people say bettah and buttah instead of better and butter but say Canader and Australier instead of Canada and Australia. WTF????

Us Canadians...WE sound FUNNY. I don't know if I've ever heard anything much funnier than a UK-er, Aussie, or American doing an Canadian accent. God we sound retarded..eh? lol At least we know how to pronounce an ERRRR at the end of a word, well, unless we're singing. Now THAT's STUPID! I'm a musician and I make sure I pronounce my ERs in songs.

You KNOW I'm just doing some good hearted teasing right? Not at all trying to offend anyone. Viva la difference. If we all sounded the same that would suck.

What is IRRITATING though is...peoples' spelling on these weed sites...but that's a different thread.

Thanks again for the ideas. Problem solved. Cane! (you mean just wooden sticks or rods right? Maybe even as big as broom handles.
:)

 

[ibTheMan]

like this. if you look i added a row with same ez to work with but strong wire.

 

[Jalisco Kid]

Order some nie-col yo-yo's with the large hook, much easier way to support your plants. JK

 

[robz]

Bamboo in the center of the pot inch or so away from main stem. Then string each top or wire or whatever to hold em up. Works great! Lot cleaner & less of a hastle then cages.

 

[half baked]

easi smokestack23, yh canes are just wooden sticks lol, im from manchester and none of us speak properly, i know what your saying about accents though, but when you sing i bet u dont sound canadian do ya lol, i find that no matter where i go, even scotland when they sing there accent jus goes and you all sound english lol very different accents in such a short space in england tho, like every 30to50 miles, erm connecting them to the lid could be tricky, you would have to have the WOODEN STICKS on the ground too because of the weight they will be holding, i'll have a joint a get back to ya with that 1 lol peace hb

 

[half baked]

cant really see a way to somehow connect the canes to the lids, buy some chip board, cut out a circle a lil bigger than the diameter of the DIY cages and just put that on pot of your pots for the cage to sit on, cut a couple of inch gap for it to slip round the main stem, 1 way of doint it so you can still get to ur roots, warning tho i can complicate things so prob best to go for the free standing route lol, peace hb

 

[smokestack23]

Hey thanks again for all the replies and ideas and HB, thanks for not taking my good-hearted ribbing as an insult. It was not my intention and you know how some people can be even or especially in these thcfarmer forums. It CAN be hard to know what someone "means" when it's written and you can't see if dude is smiling or frowning. I guess that's why we have to use emoticons and LOLs and shit like that.

ANYWAY...ya know what? I think I'm gonna have to say FUCK the roots. These plants are NUTS! I can't remember how tall and wide they were two days ago ( I wrote it down in my log and here)..like 36" or something? Well, now they're up past my nipples. They're growing at LEAST 2 or 3 inches taller every day and 6 or 8 inches in diameter. I made the system and hung the lights so the plants were 44" on center as were the lights in between the plants. I hardly have room for the lights. I simply can NOT believe it. They look like dark green volkswagon beetles. My point is that I don't need to get at the roots. I AM gonna have problems. I don't even want to LOOK at the roots. I know that those stupid 5gal pails must be almost FULL of roots by now and if not now, SOON. I'm just gonna have to PRAY to someone that nothing TOO serious happens. Pretty sure the drains will plug-up. I have 2 3/4" drains/returns at the bottom of each pail 180deg from each other. FRICK. What an idiot I am. I just had no idea though. This is frickin RIDICULOUS. They were only 2 feet tall last week when I induced them. When I first put them in there (4 in the RDWC set-up and 4 of my mothers in coco-1PK, 1BlueberryKush and 2 BUKUs), my wife was like...wow, we're not gonna be able to fill this room with 8 plants. We're gonna have to divide the room in half or something. Well, now we're asking each other if we CAN put the second 4unit RDWC in there after these mothers are done in the coco.

Those 4 mothers are in 2-1/2gal pails with ...uhhhh..probably 60%coco, 25% pearlite, and some sunshine#4. I hand feed/water them. They're doing GREAT..like normal plants do with a few thousand watts on em. They're stretching at least an inch a day and shooting out all over the place. They look like upside down green garbage cans (that's rubbish bins to you halfbaked)...but, the 4 in the RDWC, daughters of the blueberrykush mother are swallowing-up the room. They've got probably 2" diameter trunks on them. It's a frickin jungle. RH in there is around 55% but it's colder than a mofo outside so the windows upstairs in the rest of the house are soaked. The fuckin doors keep freezing shut. Christ!!

The plants are gonna outgrow the house let alone the pails and very bad things are going to happen to them and the stupid part is, it's THEIR fault!!

So, as you may have figured-out, this is my last grow of the bb/k (and pk and buku...actually I guess that isnt so obvious since I COULD have kept clones from them vegging..I didnt).

I have 4 more of the same strain vegging (blubry/ksh) waiting to go in but after them I'm switching to Big Bud X White Widow and Haze X Cheese. It's gonna be a learning curve all over again. I can see it already. I'm gonna be too scared to flower them at 24" and then they won't get big enough.

Anyone got any experience with either of those 2 strains?

OK...I'll shut up again now.

Thanks again for all the help and halfbaked...go frick yourself!..lol ;) KIDDING JK :) Bullux, Wanka, Cigarette...I mean...what do you guys call a cigarette again? haha

 

[Smokey503ski]

But you guy's have my favorite show on tv. Top Gear not the American Top Gear either. Jeremy cracks me up. I love his sence of humor.

 

[half baked]

yh top gear is ace, its my favourite show, im a builder and banter comes with the trade lol, ive grown a few of the strains like big bud and blueberry but not the crosses that you have, big bud was just silly in terms of growth, arms off arms off arms lol, by far the best yeilder ive ever done, and we call them cigs, ciggys, dole up, fags lol peace hb

 

[smokestack23]

FAGS!!! lol. I call em that too.

Top Gear. I haven't seen the American version yet but yup...it's a hit here at my house too. My favourite episode was when they had to buy cars in Florida and drive them to Louisiana. I THINK that was my fave.

Howcome us North Americans can't come up with our OWN good tv shows? It's like so many shows are copies, rip-offs, or the same as UK shows? It's even worse in Canada. For example (not one of my faves but) the Idol series. Started out in Britain then they came out with American idol...and then...we Canadians had to go have a Canadian Idol. A copy of a copy...like cloning from clones all the time...it just gets worse as each copy is made. Canadian Idol sucked so bad no one watched it after a while and it got cancelled.

Now what America DOES have to offer as far as TV goes is crime and death shows. From the First 48 to Cops to American Greed to CSI to...frick, you name it...and a lot of them are reality programs. Take the first 48. It runs twice a day here in Canada..two different episodes...how can there be so much frickin murder in one country...in one state...one city??

I had another pile of complaints about the US written but I just deleted them. The LAST thing I need is to end up on the terrorist watch list or in gitmo because of all my anti-American Empire global police worries and complaints. Just let it be at...stop incarcerating more people than any other country, help your OWN people, and stop invading every second country over money and oil....well, at least SAY that's why you're doing it instead of making up Gulf of Tomkin lies all the time. Might at least get a LITTLE respect that way.
Oh and...it would also look better to the world if they weren't literally eating themselves to an obese, diabetic death while most of the rest of the world starves. EVERYTHING is NOT always better with Jesus, bacon and oil!

Sorry for the rant. Just got up, havent had coffee or a toke and I was watching way too much tv last night. I'm over it. Kinda...just tired of being America's little brother. Shit..we tried to decrim weed and they wouldn't let us. The only thing that sucks more than them telling us we cant is that we listened. CANADA SUCKS!!!

 

[half baked]

easi smokestack23 boi that was a rant lol same here on sky, just cop shows after 10pm, thought id pop in and see how the cages are coming along, hope alls well bro

peace hb

 

[Jalisco Kid]

Bamboo and wood holds moisture which can hold bacteria.JK

 

[smokestack23]

NOW ya tell me.

I used some uhhh...wtf was it called...I dunno..it was like a roll of cickenwire but had larger holes. My wife had this big vase with a bunch of "canes" (bamboo rods about 36" long)..oops...I mean HAD..
So I ziptied the "canes"..I know right? frick...anyway...that I "wove" through the mesh stuff. I put 4 "legs" in each. Wrapped em up..I left one unwrapped.
I then went around and pulled a lot of "shoots" through the mesh. Now they look happy again and are bursting out of the holes. AND...I have a new plan..

Since they're wrapped kind of, the top shoots (about 11 days into flower) are still reaching for the sky. I'm gonna poke them down and through the mesh wrapping (I say mesh but the holes in this stuff are about 2" square) so it's gonna look like a vertical scrog. My lights hang in between the trees. I won't have to raise them to shine on the top "reachers".

We'll see.

Thanks again everyone.