growing lotsss of miniature plants in 7x7x9 inch pots, 2400 watts

hey guys, wanted to let you in on something i'm doing

a couple grows ago i managed to somehow break off a handful of low branches on my plants right before i switched to flower. strain was chemdog x sourdiesel. i didn't even bother throwing them in my cloner and just stuck them in 5x5x7 inch pots, no hormone or nothing. they all rooted, i was like huh? and just left them in my flowering room (4x600 watts). The result was beautiful, each one did the exact same thing, they grew one major "cola", which was really just a single huge bud, then 6 more buds - they all had two branch sets, so one nug per branch at the end plus 1 at the node. they pulled in between 15 and 20 grams, and they were nice and dense, covered with resin and had great esters, they matched up perfectly to the mothers in 3 and 5 gallon pots. oh and the plants were about 10 inches tall - since they didn't veg they didn't grow much more than a couple inches and add one of the branch sets. here's my feeding schedule

during veg:
foxfarms - grow big & big bloom
bloom nutrients - roots & seafuel
orca killer roots
hygrozome
humboldt nutrients structural integrity (SI is a silica additive, if you don't use a silica additive I suggest it, especially if you're doing indoors and not under optimal conditions. i have great conditions but it also helps the plant protect itself from molds, especially systemic one like PM)

@flowering i add bloom ultra and foxfarms open sesame. 36 hours dark, feed the ultra at hour 18 - you will have flowers when you turn the lights back on, no jokes

during flowering:
foxfarms tiger bloom, big bloom, open sesame, beastie bloomz, & cha-ching
bloom roots, seafuel, phat
humboldt nutrients - gravity & structural integrity
orca killer roots
hygrozome
bud candy

I use a lot of flowering additives. People usually roll their eyes or start lecturing me about stressing the plant, proper feeding, etc. I've figured out how much I can feed, which is a lot (people that freak out about gravity need to chill), before I start stressing the plants, and believe me, the results are unreal. You have to be careful though, if your strain already grows really dense nugs i might dial back the gravity and bud candy, they'll turn into f'ing rocks. and as far using foxfarms goes - i've been doing it for maybe 4 years, did advanced before that and wasn't happy. love foxfarms. only thing i think shows noticeable difference is house and garden, I haven't experimented with the Bloom base nutrients but am going to because i love them for roots and micronutrients, and ultra is the tits. I'm probably going to switch to house and garden after this grow. so damn expensive though!

SO - back to what this post is about
i've got 5 3x3 foot trays in my flowering room, and i can fit 25 7x7x9 inch pots in each tray. and for you skeptics who grow your plants in 3 gallon bags or buckets, a gallon is 231 cubic inches. the pots i'm using are 441. you can fit realistically about a gallon and a half of soil in each pot. so yah, it's not a lot of soil, but it's more than you might think, and i'm growing very small plants. i've grown 8 foot indoor plants and know how to do that too

i've potted like 60 clones, they've been vegging a few days, a couple have been vegging about a week and are looking great, they're almost at the point where i'd switch them. the plan is to let them get to around a foot then switch, so they finish just under 2 feet. i'm going to top a handful and see how they respond as well, given the short veg they're only gonna get to enough nodes for me to top right before i switch, so they won't get as much time to recover as normal and there's the whole hermie risk.

I'm trying this out on the following strains to see how the different ones respond - chemdogxsourdiesel, new york power diesel, white castle (white widowxICE), blue mystic, swiss cheese (finishes in 6 weeks, check it out), and trainwreck.

We'll see how it goes, I had a friend do this and was getting an ounce a plant routinely. i can fit 125 pots which means 125 ounces, or 3500 grams, or 1.4 grams a watt. I have 4 600 watt fixtures in a line down a my 5 trays, which create a 3x15 foot flowering area. They're all ducted with a separate intake that brings in air at around 68 degrees through a 600 cfm fan, i have xtra sun reflectors, i think they're the xxxl's, they're enormous, 32 inches wide. so basically i can get my lights really damn close. i've pulled off 2 grams per watt before, but it was doing things much differently, with 1k's and plants in 20 gallon pots that were vegged for 8 months! you need a lot of space for those kind of trees though. and those are TREES! i'm talkin trunks that at the base are thicker than my fist. ah i wish i had a warehouse again

9 lbs off that sq footage is asking a lot but i just had a friend and first time grower, i built his room and walked him through it, he pulled 6 and a half pounds off four 600 watt fixtures. those were 3 to 4 foot plants in 3 gallon bags though... i'm hopeful - think about it - i can keep my lights very low, and probably 60 to 70 percent of the plants leafs will be exposed to light - there won't be any internal crowding in each respective plant since they're so small (and i'll lollipop them), and they'll barely be crowding each other.

anyone else ever do this? wish me luck!

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here are some pics of the grow and the main room. i have another room for the mothers and my cloner (ez cloner 120 site, but if this works out i'll also get a 30 so i can make sure to fill up all 125 pots). typically i make huge clones, i make 9 inch cuttings from shoots that are about a foot and a half, you get tremendous plants that way, but i ran into some mold issues and had to chuck a bunch of plants and clone from vegging plants yada yada. there's no mylar up because i took it down to clean the walls. i have some eagle 20ew in the mail on the way, i haven't had to use it for ages and i think i'm good now but i'm going to spray anyways. i think what i was fighting was called fusarium, it's common to riesling grapes, its actually used and ends up in the fermentation. i use organocide, serenade, and liqui-cop, a copper based fungicide. i'm restarting from seed new mothers of new york power diesel, swiss cheese, and blue mystic. i'm also going to take some white castle clones and make a mother from that. the girl sitting on the floor at the end of the room next to the trays of pots is a white castle. she's my favorite and survived amazingly under a ton of stress, between me being away and the plants not getting watered, like 3 times, temps of up to 95 for a bit before i re-did the ventilation, and the whole mold thing (now it's a nice 77). needless to say i've redirected my priorities to this, i was back in school full time and working full time and now i'm done and just freelancing, a lot more time to devote to the girls!

the pic of the carbon filter is in the mother room, that's where the entrance is so i have it there rather than in the main room, which is connected with an open doorway that opens and closes by a blackout cloth pulled across a bar, i'm going to add a small filter in the main room that is blown into rather than exhausted through, so it just filters the air in the room to help as well. the big silver things attached to the fans are mufflers to cut down sound.

i put my hand next to a clone that's 6 days old, it's on its second feeding, i already have the ec up to 2.0, no burning, thing is growing super fast. the other ones around it are only 3 days old, there's a few other in the tray that are 6 days though.

i've got another 30 or so clones in the cloner that just started rooting, they'll go in the soil in a few days and i'm only going to veg them a few days, i gotta get flowering underway i'm way behind schedule and need to be able to pay my bills in the fall i don't even have room for all of them, so i might do them in the 5x5x7 inch pots, it will be interesting to compare yields. the idea in the long run is to grow as many plants as large as possible without them crowding, becoming rootbound, or putting out bs nuggets. there's the whole thing with smaller root systems equalling smaller nutrient pathways in the plant and less nutrient transfer, less metabolic function, and wack buds as a result. don't want that.