2nd grow. Lighting Advice and Seedling Advice please.

[tuffluck]

High all,

Well I think my first grow was rather something special. I ended up getting about 2.5-3 oz off 2 really nice plants and the smoke was awesome, and my third plant looked awesome and had huge buds, but was a terrible smoke, and not a good high imo.

Anyway I am back to the bag seed and determined not to make some of the mistakes I made last time.

I am using a general potting soil mix only. It has no nutes added this time (Last grow I stunted them hardcore for a bout a month untill switching soil). I have 13 seedlings right now, and will eventually have to weed them down to about 5 because of the grow room size.

I have a 2ftx2ftx5ft tall grow room in my closet with a 250 hps.

The last time I grew it was during the summer and I think the combination of being on the third floor, and the hps, and the summer heat was a bit to much for the seedlings and I ended up just vegging with 3 large cfl's that put out like 12,000 lumens all together.

Ok first question:

1) I just finally got around to getting the HPS up and running again. I have a new setup that is much more efficient. All the wires are now running from the ceiling instead of all over the floor. I can now adjust my HPS rather than last time where I was adjusting the hieght of the plants (Which is a pain when they are all different sizes and the space was limited)

So all of my seedlings are about 1 week old. They range from 3-4 inches down to 1-2 and are looking good.

Do you think the HPS is still to much for right now? Should I just stick with the 3 cfl's for a couple weeks till the plants are a little hardier? Or do you all normally veg from seedlings under a hps?

I think the temperature will be more controlled this time around with it being winter.

Second Question:
2) I have all the seedlings in 16 oz cups of soil mixed with pearlite.

The hardiest seedling already has a root that made it to the bottom of the cup and is poking out one of the drainage holes I poked in the cup.

Do you think they can sufficiently stay in the cups for another week or so? It was just yesterday I got done preparing all the damn soil mixing for 13 little seedlings

But i don't want them to get stunted at all. I want to make this an efficient and quick grow. My last grow took almost 6 months (but I also screwed up big time a couple of times). I really want to get this down to a science and since I already smoked my entire stash from my last grow I want it ASAP

3) Btw what is the earliest that I can use that technique to sex my seedlings? I wan't to be able to cut them down to 5 female plants asap. The 13 seedlings are going to be a problem if I can't sex them :P

Thanks for all your help again!

[Stylez1877]

Ok..my advice is go for the HPS now.

BUT make sure you transport them into new pots. They will indeed be stunted and can have many other problems if their roots are over crowding.

So transport them, then get a HPS on em. You can even put the cf's on the sides of them to help out with the lower leaves once the plants get bigger and its harder for light to reach that low.