Ttystikk's vertical goodness

tystikk said:

Bad news! My biggest plant got elephant's foot and wilted! She smells plenty good, we'll see how she turns out after drying. At least it will make awesome hash!

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Interesting thread. I am having a bit of a time with the concept, but I think I get the idea of screens around the light, plants around the screen.

But I saw that you mention chowmix, and RDWC. I went from RDWC, because of root rot, but kept the individual reservoirs.

I use a rose bucket on top of the reservoir and the roots are protected from rot, in the 50/50 coir and hydroton.

I am assuming that is what you mean by chowmix.

Doer said:

Interesting thread. I am having a bit of a time with the concept, but I think I get the idea of screens around the light, plants around the screen.

But I saw that you mention chowmix, and RDWC. I went from RDWC, because of root rot, but kept the individual reservoirs.

I use a rose bucket on top of the reservoir and the root are protected from rot, in the 50/50 coir and hydroton.

I am assuming that is what you mean by chowmix.

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I was using 80% hydroton and 20% coco, I've been shaving the coco off more recently.

That plant died because of a root plug, over filling the tub and drowning the plant. No others have met the same fate, since a redesign to ensure every tub has at least two separate drains.

The mesh is a vertical tube with lighting down the centerline. The plants are attached to the outside (after veg elsewhere) and trained into place, their budding sites encouraged to go through the mesh and grow in the direct light.

It isn't perfect- nothing is- but it solves the problems of space and growth better than flatland grows.

Got it. Good stuff. Fail safe drains. I just put in a fog tub. We have very low humidity.

Do I need a failsafe drain on an auto-refilling fog tub? Apparently so. It already saved me once so far.

Doer said:

Got it. Good stuff. Fail safe drains. I just put in a fog tub. We have very low humidity.

Do I need a failsafe drain on an auto-refilling fog tub? Apparently so. It already saved me once so far.

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All of my 27 gallon tuffboxes have four 1" bulkhead fittings. I now make sure they don't all go to the same hose...

Resetting and rebuilding, to incorporate lessons learned; the design now minimizes elbows and emphasizes straight through connections.

Every Super Silo has one big fan blowing upwards from the bottom, to force air circulation, heat removal and refresh CO².

My air handlers draw the warmest air from near the ceiling and shove it down through the Icebox exchangers and then continue down towards the floor. Under the pipe is my control bucket, so condensate returns to the RDWC automatically. Details.

The Iceboxes are totally inadequate to the task of climate control by themselves, they can deal with temps but not humidity- They're simply too small to handle my setup, not their fault.

The next step is installing a scrapyard find, a big water to air exchanger that's over fifteen by eighteen inches. I'm thinking this kind of surface area will achieve a higher rate of total condensation, thus keeping up with plant transpiration better.

Hi ttystikk
ive been following your thread and the other vert ones too (that get updated regular) and I must say you guys have some awesome setups and im going to give vert a go once my room comes down in a couple of months, unfortunately I completely suck at any form of hydro so just gunna play it safe and stick with soil.

keep up the good work, love the pics of your bud wall silos!!!

dankdope said:

Hi ttystikk
ive been following your thread and the other vert ones too (that get updated regular) and I must say you guys have some awesome setups and im going to give vert a go once my room comes down in a couple of months, unfortunately I completely suck at any form of hydro so just gunna play it safe and stick with soil.

keep up the good work, love the pics of your bud wall silos!!!

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Thanks for the kind words!

Vertical works with soil just fine, my guess is that you'll want to get bigger pots and water more than with a normal flat canopy setup.

There's a wealth of great info here, so when the time comes to get specific about your intentions, let us know- in detail- and we can steer you past at least some of the pitfalls.

Very nice. I will be back...

Veg is a key to this. I'm still experimenting with how to do the veg so the plants don't freak out when they hit the Super Silo.

vertical or horizontal SCROG method has a huge learning curve. I spent years horizontal before I did my vertical setup. The key was the timing of when to flip into floral stage so that the rest of the vertical screen will fill in. Knowing your strain helps a lot and that is why I stayed with what I liked to smoke.
My system uses only 3 plants equally spaced out around the cylinder screen. 2 ft. high 6ft long= 12 sq ft of growing area. If I only occupy a 3ft sq area for the system , that is 9sq feet of horizontal area for the three plants. More room does mean a bit more vegy time, but with DWC method things grow a bit faster it seems, at least I think so.
I also pulled back all the leaf I could keeping it on the outside as much as possible. Figured the more buds exposed to the light the better they could grow. Not every branch stayed on the plant, nor leaf or bud site, again one has to look at what is going to help all other produce best, and I do away with the rest.
I used a 400hps inside a pyrex tube, still some heat issues, so I built this LED tower for the light source and soon I hope to see how well it performs for me, but I am just growing for my medicine and only care about keeping myself with meds.

@only1realhigh , I enjoy your input, it is quite a learning curve.

If love to see a few pics of your setup- especially that octagonal LED fixture you built!

see if I can get a pic

Okay this is my way/ system that I built. A personal 2ft tall screen that is 6ft long wrapped around a steel rod frame I made that uses 3 plants. Originally I used a 400watt HPS to light it up, now I am going to use this LED tower.


The key of this is I vegy the plants in this system. Once they get the lower foot of screen covered I flip to 12/12 for flowering. The second photo shows the system right before I flip them. I used the strectch and slower growth to finish filling the upper half of the screen. Again timing is everything in SCROG method weather it is vertical or horizontal.
Now this LED tower has both a vegy spectrum (set at lower end of tower ) and the floral spectrum which is spread out over the length of the tower. 2 ft tall heat sink to fit the 2ft tall screen. All LED's are dimmable and can be independently turned off to help me provide the needed spectrum for the different stages of growth, plus I get to play with the intensity of it all.
My whole point is you can get much better coverage on the screen if you vegy the plants up and around the screen from the start. You also get to remove out side edge as it grows removing plant shock.
One other key is that after all is grown and floral stage is getting under way, I remove leaf, more than many think of, but I want the bud sites to get all the light they can. I grow bud and not leaf.

That's fuckin' righteous! I'm very impressed by the level of detail, stuff like only putting veg spectrum LED sources in the bottom half of the unit, since you knew that by the time the plant grows up near the too, it's always in bloom anyway.

Your insights about vegging the plants on the trellis mirror mine, as well. I've rearranged my entire process to include a couple weeks of prebloom veg time on the trellis.

I'm not happy about my veg, so I've been doing some rearranging. Making the spaces bigger and giving the girls more watts. The goal is to have healthy ladies big enough to fill the trellis in fully by the end of stretch. Right now, my veg suffers a bit due to being overcrowded. This helps them grow taller but it starves the lower branches of light and that hurts yield.

ttystikk, if you are not worried about plant count or have room, let some plants get taller for the upper end of the screen/trellis area. Remove them lower branch's you know you will not use. Bring in younger smaller vegy'ed plants for the lower end of the trellis/screen. Now you give a week or so vegy time to get all trained and flip with the pre expactations of their stretch when you flip to 12/12 light schedule.
If you want, some would feed a 50/50 mix of vegy/bloom during that first week giving the plants more stretch. I know I would just keep on the vegy feeding cycle the first week when doing horizontal screen with indica's to fill in more, at the same time cleaning all material off the plant below the screen. Drop an hour of light, and nail them with bloom nutrients, yet another way was slowly drop an hour of light from 18 hours as you train that week of vegy feed, switch mix and light schedule when you can anticipate the stretch to fill in the screen.
I used to monitor my daily growth rate to aid me in figuring out when to flip into floral and have a full screen. If I got more than I wanted, just trimmed it back so I only had what the screen could handle.
Remember: many bud sites is not always the answer as more selective bud sites for good bud growth. I found topping a plant at 18 inchs, leaving only 4 selected branchs on the stem, flipping them after a week recovery, double this strains yield for me. The key was I had 4 nice huge colas to trim up, not 200 plus little ones that took days.
I strongly believe knowing your strain and growing it constantly allows one to learn it, predict it, and you can improve your method, feeding schedule, and the overall yield from each grow as you learn more. How did I remember it all from one grow to another, well I kept grow journals on my computer (not the smartest thing) but I did it that way.

You're one of several people who have suggested I top the main stem. I used to do this when I ran an early ScrOG style on a horizontal canopy, but intentionally stopped when I confronted the challenge of growing six foot tall plants.

I should play with it again, see what happens...

If you can, maybe do one plant growing tall, clean up lower end, move in the younger plant and top it, train those branch's to feel in that lower area.
Kinda stage them up the vertical screen. If it works well than you can do them all that way the next run.
All I know is when I do it (top the plants main stem ) the remaining branch's I leave become main cola's that produce even better than I thought. Just think of say a the open space on the lower end of the screen, say it is 18" tall, now a 24" tall plant with the upper 6" taken off, than take a selected branch trained to the left and to the right to fill in the area. Meanwhile the taller upper plant keeps growing taller and gets trained.
If you ever want to limit the stretch of the plant, crush,pinch, the main stem or long the branch area as every thing below the pinched area grows more as the damage area heals. You can manipulate this plant in so many ways it is just up to the grower and what they want to achieve. Grow on anyway you choose, but you can always try a few suggestions to see if they work for you.

All of the techniques you suggest are old hat to me, at least in other arrangements.

The decision not to top the main stem of these plants was intentional, and it's resulting in scads of little buds plus a few big ones. Spending lots of time trimming larf helps, but they're a bear just owing to the size of the trellis; 25 ft² is a lot of plant!

I've done this technique before, in horizontal canopies- in fact, is the best way I know of to make a horizontal canopy that works well... which is why I didn't use it when I went vertical!

Which goes to show, sometimes the more things change... definitely going to play with this a bit. My veg has been slipping of late.

only1realhigh said:

ttystikk, if you are not worried about plant count or have room, let some plants get taller for the upper end of the screen/trellis area. Remove them lower branch's you know you will not use. Bring in younger smaller vegy'ed plants for the lower end of the trellis/screen. Now you give a week or so vegy time to get all trained and flip with the pre expactations of their stretch when you flip to 12/12 light schedule.
If you want, some would feed a 50/50 mix of vegy/bloom during that first week giving the plants more stretch. I know I would just keep on the vegy feeding cycle the first week when doing horizontal screen with indica's to fill in more, at the same time cleaning all material off the plant below the screen. Drop an hour of light, and nail them with bloom nutrients, yet another way was slowly drop an hour of light from 18 hours as you train that week of vegy feed, switch mix and light schedule when you can anticipate the stretch to fill in the screen.
I used to monitor my daily growth rate to aid me in figuring out when to flip into floral and have a full screen. If I got more than I wanted, just trimmed it back so I only had what the screen could handle.
Remember: many bud sites is not always the answer as more selective bud sites for good bud growth. I found topping a plant at 18 inchs, leaving only 4 selected branchs on the stem, flipping them after a week recovery, double this strains yield for me. The key was I had 4 nice huge colas to trim up, not 200 plus little ones that took days.
I strongly believe knowing your strain and growing it constantly allows one to learn it, predict it, and you can improve your method, feeding schedule, and the overall yield from each grow as you learn more. How did I remember it all from one grow to another, well I kept grow journals on my computer (not the smartest thing) but I did it that way.

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Actually.. Veg nutes (higher in N) will grow more compact, bushy plants.. It is bloom nutes (High in P) that will make your plants stretch more.