In this article we’re going to talk about how to get the most out of your grow space, allowing you to improve the grams/watts ratio and making the most out of your bulbs, ballasts, fertilizers etc…
There are generally two main ways of planting the most plants in the space you have available if it’s limited:
SOG
This stands for Sea Of Green, and it was originally designed to increase production rather than quantity of plants. Basically, you have to stick the maximum amount of plants you can in a 2m squared area in the smallest pots possible. Personally, I wouldn’t use any pots smaller than 1.80/2L if you’re planting in coco and 3.25L if you’re planting in soil. The reasoning behind this is that if there’s too little soil it’s pretty easy to over-fertilize your plants accidentally without a drip irrigation system.
Pros:
- They don’t need that much growth, so you don’t have to have the lights on 18/6 for too long.
- As soon as they develop a decent root system you can transplant them, and after 7 to 10 days of growth once the roots are really in there, you can change the lighting to 12/12 and begin flowering them. This means that you just saved 15 days of growth, which your electricity bill will be grateful for.
- You’ll need to begin flowering them when they’re about 15 to 20cm tall, because the next two weeks is when they’ll grow quite tall, doubling in height at the very least. We also recommend training them with plastic stakes.
Cons:
- Your workload will multiply with this grow method as you’ll have to take care of quite a lot of plants, mother plants if you have them and the future clones.
So, if you have enough space and time, this method is the fastest in as far as yield.
SCRoG
This means Screen of Green, which consists in pruning your plants and bending them until you fill an entire growing screen or mesh, which guarantees that you’ll cover the entire area with buds. An example would be 4 to 6 nicely pruned plants bent to fit in the mesh perfectly with its branches and in a 14L flowerpot. This will completely cover a 1m square meter plot. To completely cover the area you’ll need to have 50-65% of the mesh while the plants are growing, as once they go into the flowering period they’ll shoot up again.
Pros:
- You’ll get quite a large production just like with the SOG method, although there’s a lot less plants but they’re much bigger.
- You won’t need to grow a mother plant because you can just grow them from seeds and that will save you quite a lot of time.
Cons:
- The growth period is longer than SCRoG.
- Taking care of mother plants can be hard if you don’t have much space.
- It needs more attention during the growth period and the first two weeks of the flowering period to bend the branches and prune various times to get the most amount of branches possible.
Now you know the difference between these two methods of growing indoors. SOG requires more effort than SCRoG but it gives higher results.
Author: Jesus, GB Torrent
Translation: Ciara Murphy
