My First Grow Ever, 68 watt cfl

This is my first grow ever, ever. I dont know what strain any of these plants are. I think their either some form of canadian beaster or some northern lights maybe, not sure. I've got a bag of random seeds. I'm really just experimenting with different grow techniques in order to find the one that I like the best for growing mothers for cloning, and various other grow techniques such as FIMing and LST. I will never again do this but I started the seedlings in miracle grow, they were burned, badly, very, very badly once they matured a little. I was able to prune and allow new growth to overtake the burned leaves that would produce nothing and often times fell off the stem under their own weight.

Let me reitterate that for you. Don't, if you care if your plant's leaves stay attached to the plant, use miracle grow. On one of my plants the burning was so bad that she stopped growing all together. It was pretty pathetic.

As for the photos here, the first three are from my first start (in the damn miracle grow). The Plants are under a 2700k 3000 lumen 68 Watt CFL bulb. Oddly enough this light has kept all four plants alive rather impressively with only one for four plants. I bought a lamp off ebay but the seller had a death in the family and dropped off the face of the planet for 2 weeks, finally getting back to me yesterday saying his dad died and he was sticking my light in the mail as he was sending me the email. Maybe i can flower with that one and just use the 68 for veging... I'm concerned if a bluer kelvin would cause my nodes to be closer together. On Catherine, the LST plant, her nodes are only about 1/2 - 3/4 of an inch appart. Though on Lola (ill show you pictures of her later) her nodes are slightly further apart which can either be blamed to the inadequate lighting or the fact that im growing her straight up and her nodes are getting closer together the more mature she gets.

The last seven pictures are of Catherine, the plant I'm LSTing and Claudia, the plant I FIMed. The 7th and 10th pictures are the examples of fims that didn't take. They eventually look like the 8th, growing with their leaves cut off at the tips because i didn't cut enough of the leaf off. The 9th picture is an example of a fim that did take. I eventually got two main colas from the cut on each lower leaf and stem elbow, two more from the place where I cut, and one in between the two others in the cut for a total of five main colas from one fim. I fimmed Claudia 5 times and 2 fimms took. The others just looked funky, i blame this on my noob cuts though.

 

First two pictures are of Lola, the plant I'm growing without interference. Her stalk is about 1/2" in this picture but its about 3/4" now since I've taken these. The third picture is an excellent example of why we don't use MG. That's Bernice and she was burned so badly she actually stopped growing for a little while. I LSTed her and now she's catching up to the rest of the pack, but i wish I had started in my good Faffard potting soil instead of the damned MG.

The last two pictures are of my basic setup. There you can see my desk lamp, the bulb in there is so heavy that i have to anchor it to the piece of styroboard i have over the plants.

the last 6 pictures are the most recent ones. They've gotten so big and once that lamp comes in the mail I'm gonna see if I can flower one of these and maybe start some clones off Lola or Claudia. Catherine (the best LST) is going into flowering next week.

 

Not entirely sure to be honest. Somewhere in the realm of 3+ weeks. I'd say no more than a month.

 

Finally got that damn light in from that dude on Ebay. Gonna upload some pictures of the newly built flowering room tomorrow. I used pvc piping and b/w poly to make a 2.5x5' flowering room with 3 2700k 3000lumen 68 watt cfl bulbs. Right now I'm using a sharper image ionizing air filter (the kind with the metal filter that you just wipe clean) and ona gel to control the smell, should that be enough? I haven't gotten the plants to a stage that they're making any smell but I think that should control it sufficiently.

 

Well, haven't come back to this thread in awhile. Been busy, very busy. I do have pictures of the flowering room I built back then tho. Here

That plant is Claudia, the best of the seed started lot. She yielded 56g. Lola the biggest one, and Catherine (the best LST plant) turned out to be males Luke, and Christopher. So they were chopped. Bernice (the worst of the nutrient burned ones) and Claudia were my remaining females. In the last pictures you can see the flowers on Claudia and the effect that Miracle Grow has on a plant, even in the best of conditions. Claudia was my least of the nutrient burned while she was vegetating. However the Miracle Grow's Nutrients refused to let any one of my plants not become burned eventually. Flushing didn't really help much either. The reason I believe that the plants were able to withstand this was because they were transplanted into better soil (Faffard Professional Potting mix).

Clones from burned plants can more easily become burned themselves also. I'm not sure how you would flush the nutrients out of the cutting seeing as I started mine in rockwool cubes and used nothing but water to root them, yet they still show purple stems and deep green leaves even as adults.