Best way to grow Chernobyl

Hullo people, I'm a lover of the Chernobyl, fantastic smoke, but as of yet I've failed to get any significant yield from it because of the stretching, what's the best way to grow this guys?

Also just bought some Querkle. I'm trusting in the TGA genetics

If you are getting to much stretch. Mabey your lights are not close enough? Or perhaps you need better lights? Whats your veg lights? Whats your flower lights? You need to flower under either HPS or metal halide lamps....preferably flowering under at least 400 watts with 600 or 1000 watts even better. And veg under blue spectrum metal halide or t5 bulbs as opposed to the red spectrum of HPS. The T5 bulbs encourage shorter bushier plants but you can still low stress train your plants and top them for 4 or 5 colas. If you do this you should pull 2 oz or 3 off each plant flowered in at least 5 gallons of supersoil.

Then again you may know all about this.....just throwing out some advice. Hope this helps someone.

GH

Here's what I do.

Once clones are rooted and transplanted into soil and have started vertical growth, I top them immediately after I have two nodes to work with. I top and prune the lowers, if any, so there are four fan leaves and four shoots growing from them. Two nodes worth of growth.

Then let them grow until the two dominant shoots are around 8" long. By this time it's time to transplant from the #1 pot to the final 7gal pot 1/2 filled with super soil. After the plants have a day or two to settle in the new pot and are snug and happy in their new homes, I begin gradually training the dominant shoots until they are nearly parallel with the soil line. This may take a few days, you don't want to do it all at once and risk breaking the stalk. When these shoots are trained out properly, their new growth should now be below the two lower secondary shoots.

Those shoots are now the dominant shoots and after a day or two will begin to explode with upward growth because they are now getting the apical dominance hormones. Once they've grown up to roughly the size of the original dominant shoots, begin to train them out until their new growth is even with the new growth on the other two shoots. Now you have a nice, wide bush and because all of the growth is now at nearly the same level, the growth hormones are distributed evenly throughout the plant.

Now you just let her grow. Every node on the plant will now give you a shoot growing upwards and you will end up with a nice bushy sphere of goodness.

Let them veg out for seven or eight weeks from clone and you will end up with a gigantic bush full of primo tops. Prune away all the lower crap before bloom and then again two weeks into bloom and you'll have nothing but killer nuggage. The key is canopy management. Try and keep it all on the same level. If you train the plant properly, you won't have any shoots that are much dominant than others and will kind of spread the stretch evenly around all of the many tops that are now growing into a wide bush instead of a plant with tall dominant main shoots. Some plants don't like to be trained, but based on Chernobyl's genetics, I'd bet a dollar that she'll love it.

Also, environment will help to keep the stretch down. The less of a difference between day and night temps, the less stretching, in my experience.

1kw lights helps too, lol.

Good luck, brother. Just keep in mind that Chernobyl isn't a huge yielder. You might be barking up the wrong tree if your goal is production.

I'm currently flowering and veging under a 250w hps, but I have also seen this grown by a friend vegged under a 400w 20/4 and flowered under a 600w and they consistently stretch by 200% original size, massive spacing between nodes. Also I always FIM multiple points on my sativa heavy plants while they are nice an low. Chernobyl vegges into a lovely bush and then becomes rather elongated.

PS. Not a producer, quite the opposite the reason i want better yields is to keep my plant numbers low. Only ever grow for my own personal pleasure

I'm just now flowering out my chernobyl under a 1000w hps + 400w CMH. I'll let you know how she stretches. I rarely get huge stretch unless the genetics make a plant 3x in size. I think the blue light of the cmh minimizes my stretch and increases my density.

chernobyl has very little stretch,Ive had all 4 phenos...

hydroponically

Mr.Therapy Man 2 said:

chernobyl has very little stretch,Ive had all 4 phenos...

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How far are your lights? What lights to you use? Hydroponic or soil? method of growing?

And I can assure you they don't half stretch when they do. I've seen this on 4 separate females from seed under varying conditions.

I scrogged it yield was much better.

The Trainwreck dom pheno defanitly has some stretch, but not enough to effect the yield. She's not the biggest yielder , but those colas get long and chunky! Get your lights closer or up the wattage! Should have at least 60 watts sq./ft.!!!!! Hope this helps!

I have grown with a 250w hps before. They really work best with lst, sog and scrog techniques. It's best to keep most of the flowers within 22 inches of the light to get a satisfactory yield. Streching is natural with sativa leaning hybrids but, you can minimize it by keeping day/nightime temps as even as possible.

All my plants are between 1 - 4 inches from cool tube usually and as for light power as I said I've seen this grown under a 600 and a 250 with extremely similar results I'm gonna try a scrog of it and supercropping it.

My chernobyl has stretched quite a bit already. I put it into flower 10 days ago and it's probably gone from 20 inches tall to 32 inches. That's quite a bit compared to everything else in my grow. I hope this girl is a good yielder/tasty pheno.

DaGrapeApe said:

My chernobyl has stretched quite a bit already. I put it into flower 10 days ago and it's probably gone from 20 inches tall to 32 inches. That's quite a bit compared to everything else in my grow. I hope this girl is a good yielder/tasty pheno.

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Im glad you revived this thread! I love Chernobyl and have grown quite a bit of it. I have had the best luck with pinching early on, then LST (and pinch more) as soon as it can handle it. then I generally supercrop the dominant stalk to drive the love back down. Just shoot for an even canopy during veg, then continue to LST through the 3 week stretch into flower. Its not high yeild plant, but I consistently pull 1/2 lb per plant cured (1 to 1-1/2 lb per light) with it.

I just started documenting a Chernobyl grow if you want to check it out - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCVtFfeaZ1QX27b9x67GuIw

Good Luck!

I've found the best way is to fill your jeans pockets up with soil and just plant seed direct, takes a bit of practice to train the plant round the belt rings but I prefer this method as the plants always on hand and I can adjust any issues straight away, to initiate flower just start wearing a longer jumper and make sure u roll it down same time each day!

Any success mainlining chernobyl?

TrichomeBob said:

I've found the best way is to fill your jeans pockets up with soil and just plant seed direct, takes a bit of practice to train the plant round the belt rings but I prefer this method as the plants always on hand and I can adjust any issues straight away, to initiate flower just start wearing a longer jumper and make sure u roll it down same time each day!

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You've just changed the game. Fuck fabric pots. Fabric pockets.

I mainlined a Chernobyl outdoors last year, it was successful and I didn't get too much stretch but she doesn't have the strongest structure so needs some support on her branches.


The Chernobyl is the farther back one in the stem picture, and the plant on the left in the whole plant pictures.