Poppin my grow cherry!

How many plants do you plan on growing?

 

if u keep them in clear cups it might kill ur roots.

 

You're gonna need a lot more light.

 

pics?

 

Give them another day or two. I planted my seeds after I germinated them and they had like 1/4" taproot on them. Took two days before I saw any sprouts.

 

You need to get rid of the tin foil.It is not a very good reflector.It caused hotspots which will burn your plants in some areas and starve them of light in others.

Get some mylar or white emulsion

 

yeah what i did was put of pieces of white paper and covered every inch of my box
its a cheap solution but a bit time consuming

 

Nice. This right here alone tells me you care about your babies. However, there are at least 3 things you've been told that it doesn't look like you've listened to: 1) you need more light ASAP; 2) git rid of the foil ASAP; 3) you are killing them in the clear cups. Bear with me a little, I'm going to go into detail about each one.

1) From the pics, it looks like you're using a 23w or so (100w eql) cfl. You need at least 4 of those. I am not kidding. The picture is fuzzy and I can't tell the exact size of the bulb, but even if it's a 42w job instead of the smaller 23w, you still need to get 3 of them. I know it's a small space (and you *will* outgrow it even with one plant very fast, start looking for a bigger box now -- remember, these are voracious little weeds!) but 1 cfl will not grow anything beyond 6", unless maybe it's a monster 105w bulb (500w eql) or bigger. The rule of thumb here is you need at least 100w+ per plant in cfl watts (actual cfl watts, not incandescent equivalent watts).

And get the plants closer to the light! Put some books under them or something. With a cfl, the closer the better. I'm talking like within an inch. Literally. Light diminishes by the square of the distance (if you're twice as far away, you're getting 1/4th the light, not 1/2).

2) Using foil like that is just bad for your plants, especially so in such a small space. Either take the suggestion of replacing it with white paper, or just take it out. You'd be better off with nothing. It looks shiny, but it is a terrible reflector. White paper reflects more light, honest. And the light that the foil does reflect, some of it gets focused like a magnifying glass (remember burning ants with a magnifying glass as a kid?) and some of it gets diffused and scattered everywhere else BUT the plants. Just get rid of it.

3) You are killing the roots with the clear cups. Think about it, roots are normally underground and aren't supposed to get light. By using clear cups, you are exposing them to light. This kills them. Kill the roots and you kill the plant. If you don't want to expose them to the shock of transplanting right now, at least put the clear cups inside another type of cup which is not clear, or wrap them in black duct tape.

Sounds like you're watering too much. Without using a moisture meter, watering every day is going to be way too much, especially in cups with no drainage. As someone has said (can't remember who right now), overwatering kills more plants every year than the police. So get yourself one of those triple-meters that does light, ph, and moisture. They're about $25 and worth every penny.

Also, that "6500k" on the bulb is not the watts, it's the spectrum. This is the second time you've mentioned it instead of the real wattage, so I think maybe you're confused about the cfl numbers. The spectrum number refers to the visible wavelengths the light puts out, not how bright it is. 6500k is "full spectrum", which means that it puts out most of the visible wavelengths equally, as opposed to, say, 2700k which is "warm white" and has a more yellowish color. 6500K is what you want to grow, it is fine for vegging and flowering (although some people suggest switching to 2700K for flowering, to mimic the more diffuse natural light spectrum of fall/winter).

So the spectrum doesn't tell you how bright the light is, that's what the wattage number is for. And this may be a little confusing for cfls, since they usually have two wattage numbers on the package. One is the actual cfl watts used, and the other is the "equivalent" watts, which is what size a regular incandescent light bulb would need to be in order to look as bright. The actual cfl wattage is usually about 1/4th the incandescent equivalent, so a 23w cfl would also say "100w" somewhere on the package to let you know that it's as bright as a normal 100w bulb. And as I said before, for growing you need at least 100w in *actual* cfl watts per plant (not the incandescent equivalent watts). That may seem like a lot, but it's pretty hard to have too much light and very easy to have too little.

Take these suggestions, and others that you are given, and you should do fine. Remember, people make suggestions to help, and are usually doing so because they were once in your shoes making the same mistakes.

Good luck!

 

your mom found it?! damn, if my mom found mine she would kill me,

thats why i have it in a secret hiding spot lol