Yes, 12 hours or more of uninterrupted darkness is what gets the plant to flower. 12/12 being the most common for most of the flowering period, some people give sativa dominant strains that have a hard time finishing/ripening (all milky white trichomes with maybe some amber ones) in a short amount of time more than 12 hours of darkness to kinda speed things up toward the end of the flowering period. Most people believe most strains should get a little darkness even during the vegetative period, vegetative growth requires a significant amount of light above 12 hours and most believe giving at the very least 6 hours of darkness is important to overall health and so use a 18/6 for the vegetative growth period, the exception being autoflower strains that have a ancestry of growing near the arctic circle in Siberia and so like parts of Alaska, there may be up to 6 months of 24 hours of sun during parts of the summer and is why they have evolved the ability to to flower on a kinda set schedule even with getting 24 hours of light their whole life.
u can buy calibration solution for ur meter to check it on amazon 10 bucks and if u follow the feeding instructions on the nutes it will have ur ppm about right maybe a lil adjustment needed but theres also a window of where it should be mine are in veg and between 950 and 1000 ppm but thats with the nutes calmag aquashield and sensizyme ur roots do look healthy but a lil brown prolly from light getting in i would recommend the aquashield as a preventative to root rot and it will also help with roots being able to absorb nutrients but definately need to raise that ppm easing into nutrients like that cause stress on the plants imagine if every time u sat down to eat u got one bite and that was it u would be stressed as well
I am in trouble. I finally got the PH thing down and got the nutrients good and since I was having some trouble with the plants I purchased some GH aqua shield and put in the recommended amount, when I checked them morning the plants were wilted and looked like shit. I think I messed up by not checking the ph. after I put in the aqua shield, it was up to 9.0 this morning after being 6.3 last night. I quickly dumped the bad water and put new ph. balanced with nutrients and will hope for the best. I hope I didn’t kill them. They were looking pretty good and I was ready to flower them, now I don’t know what to do? 
Can they come back from this devastation? I was so excited to go to flower. I know this is going to be trial and error and I am going to have some more failures, but this was a big oops. Any help or comments would be appreciated. Thanks, 620Smitty.
Yes, that will do it, you always need to be sure of your ph. Like I said, with a reservoir so small, you should probably always pre-mix the maximum volume of your reservoir in a separate container, mix all your nutrients and things like aqua shield first, and then before adding to the reservoir you test and are sure of PPM and PH before it even touches your roots. That is the safest way to do it with a setup like yours, and please get that tub light proofed, aqua shield can only help so much.
For now as things are stable, you can only wait and hope, there is a good chance it should start to spring back.
BTW, remove the really sickly looking foliage.
If the leaf looks kinda like it is totally dead and/or almost even like it is rotting away on the vine so to speak, it isn’t doing any good and isn’t coming back. It really needs to come off the plant, it is only going to harbor mold/fungi and give it a place to grow and something to eat.
It looks like a lot of the leaf death might not be at all entirely from all the reservoir stress. I know you have been told not to cut off the big fan leaves unless they are blocking the light significantly from getting to other parts of the plants that you want to develop, but the canopy also needs to be a little airy. Many leaves that are not getting enough light will start to die just because of not enough light. They should be removed as they start to wither and turn yellow, eventually you will get a understanding and know ahead of time what to remove that won’t reduce your overall yield. Your grow box is kinda designed for more of a sea of green “lolly pop” trained and pruned plants, you will get there with knowledge, it is a lot to put together all at once, we all had to start somewhere.
Thanks for the quick response Mac, The plants are responding already and I have metallic taped my spare reservoir and lid and light proofed the one in the box and will do a better job when I switch and put new water and nutrients. I thought they were goners, but they might make it. How long should I keep in vegetative since this occurred? Should I wait another week and then switch to flower, if they make it. 
I removed the wilted and dead looking leaves. The ppm is 760 and the ph. is 6.3. Temp is 70 and humidity is 56%. The reason I started this is because the medical is so expensive in NJ. By the time I pay tolls and gas, nor to mention 1 1/2hr each way in driving to the dispensary plus $535 for an oz. its just too much. For the cost of 2 oz. I got the whole setup and seeds. I am already looking to make a 3x4x7 closet and let my wife use the box for organic vegetables. I also bought a drying box but do not know if it will be any good after reading the blogs and support sections of this site. It still might work. I really want to thank Mac and all you other people out there helping us new growers. Keep up the good work. I didn’t want to lose these plants but they were just seeds I had laying around and some others that a buddies son brought back from California [his were good but I don’t know what they were ]. I am waiting to grow the OG and super skunk I got from Robert and the white widow, Himalayan gold and Super silver haze I got elsewhere. Thanks again and keep on truckin, Smitty
No problem, I think they should pull through.
Here is a link that will help you out at this stage of the grow, this is when you can do a lot of pruning. Of course it is better to have started with a plan of attack along the way, but that kinda takes the experience of watching what part or parts of the plants do what and turn into what, or in general how the plant grows and develops in general, so you know what you can or don’t want to cut off, lol.
Hi, Just checking in. The plants survived and are doing great. I did a little more pruning and after 4 days I switched them over to 12/12 flower stage. I finally have the PH and the PPM under control. When will be able to sext them? I check on them 4/5 times a day. Do I just keep checking to see if they are male or female? I know you have been asked a million times but as a first timer I get a little nervous with what to do especially when I thought they all died. Sorry if its a stupid question
They might not show sex for a few days to maybe a couple of weeks. Don’t worry, if you are checking once a day you will catch and be able to remove the males before they release any pollen. If you have feminized seeds from a reputable seller you shouldn’t have to worry and they will be pretty much female guaranteed.
Hi, I am growing 9 plants in a Grandma’s secret garden box and the canopy is so large and bushy that it looks like at least 3 maybe 4 are not getting enough light and are scrawny. I am in flowering stage now. Will I still get some buds on the small ones? Can the little ones be transferred to dirt after growing hydroponically and be put outside or are they just lost causes? I am in the process of converting a closet for more room for the next grow or I might wait until I get a few grows under my belt, but the closet is almost ready. The grow box is a little small and the closet will be 3 x 4 x 7, so it wont be as cramped.
You haven’t even removed males yet, right?
So the canopy may open up a lot as soon as you find out which ones have to be removed. Of course it would be better if they had all been trained and/or pruned to all be about the same size, so if any of the small ones turn out to be female, they would have been maybe bigger and given you a bigger yield, but that not being the case, at least they will give you fruit and of course the males will not.
The light stunted ones will continue to grow, as will the rest of them, about another third their size, during the flowering cycle.
I have not removed the males yet. It has been only 4 days into flowering. If I am reading the plants right it looks like most are females [ They look like pistols to me from the pictures in the bible ] and 4 I cant really tell yet. I don’t know the strain and know half came from a buddy in California and the others were seeds I saved from some good weed. I cant imagine they are all females since I don’t know the history, I can only hope.
Well unless the ones your buddy had were feminized and all things being equal you’ll have about 50/50 males and females. We’ll have to wait and see, in the beginning, even staminates can look like they might be pistilates.
Hi, the plants are in 2nd week of flowering and doing great. The problem now is they are now at the lights and I keep bending them out of the way, but they are like an old man on Viagra they keep popping up and I am afraid of burning them. They are in a grow box and have exceeded their limit. I want to tie them downward but am afraid of breaking the stems and branches. Any ideas will be appreciated. Thanks Smitty,
It’s is too bad you don’t have some close up pictures of the flowers, I might be able to help you pick out the males earlier with a more trained eye.
I know we say don’t cut off your large fan leaves, but in this case I’m going to tell you to cut off the worse looking ones. I see a bunch that should already be removed, as there is so much of the leaf already dead. All the rotting looking ones need to be removed for sure, pretty much always. They will just give a place for mold/fungi to propagate. Remove even the ones that are just dry dead (kinda yellow/brown) at the edges and have spots, this is just to thin up the canopy as everything is so crowded. After this is done and I can get a better look at what is going on in your grow with “after” pics, I might even have you do more drastic pruning. This whole situation is way overcrowded and nothing is ideal, so any loss to potential yeild from pruning this late in the game is not as big a deal as losing the entire yeild to dying plants or bud rot when the flowers get a lot bigger and more crowded. A stunted healthy flower would be much better smoke or what have you anyway, and certainly better than the alternatives, nothing or tons of moldy bud.
I just had deja vu, didn’t I already say something like this to you weeks ago? Maybe it was someone else with a very similar situation, but I thought I had already told you about the removing the really dying leaves and the idea of some healthy good stuff is better than nothing at all. And this thread is so long and goes so far back it is hard to keep all the details straight. Anyway, your situation is so crowded and if not a lot of males are to be removed we need to do some drastic things I would not necessarily recommend all the time otherwise. More on that, if we need to do it, after I see some flowers up close and a highly cleaned up canopy.
Hi Mac, we did talk about trimming and I did its just that after I figured out ppm and ph they grew wild. I trimmed them just now and changed water, I took the little one out and am now down to 6 which more suits the grandma box. I also am sending pictures of the flowers and the newly trimmed plants. Thanks Smitty
