Guess my yield? CFL closet grow

Don't expect much being your first grow with cfl's. I'd expect ¼ gram per watt at the most, and that's if you train them properly, keep your bulbs close and cool, and your soil mix is optimal.

I'd ditch the miracle gro, real organic fertilizer mixes can be found for $5-$7/ 2lb bag. Just mix some of that with wormcastings into the top layer of soil for healthy plants. That way you don't have to measure ph, which you should be doing if you're using miracle gro solubles. Works just as well as any synthetic fertilizer, if not better

 

Espoma, Happy Frog (the fertilizer, not the soil), Dr Earths, Organic Traditions are all good brands. I use Espoma, recommend the "tomato-tone" mix of theirs, gets high marks from the pros around here.

 

Yep.

Espoma Tomato Tone and Kelp Meal, EWC, Peat, Lime and Perlite are what I plan on mixing up as soon as I have the money.


MG Organic Choice has been FUCKING up my seedlings for far too long.

 

I don't understand why people are so against MG. I use it for my grows and it goes great. Hell i have a plant finishing in about a month or less with MG as soil, 400 HPS light in a big ass pot. Then again i don't use Organic, I use the 6 months nut stuff.

 

not a single seed has done well in my MG OC. They always get all burnt/brown/yellow in that stuff man. And they stay small forevvvver. I got 3 seedlings right now, almost 2 weeks old, still working on their second leave set. I can only think it's the soil honestly. The same thing has happened to.....like 9 plants/seedlings now because of this.

I'm just gonna mix 100-200 worth of shit together and have a mix that I can use over and over, and never have to worry about mixing nutes or any of that BS again.

 

Your flourescent tubes aren't much good if they usually sit where they are in that photo. Most of the light isn't even going into the grow space, and the power of the light isn't high. Consider re-positioning them closer to the plants. Maybe you could hang them over the plants and use the CFLs as above-side lighting, or if they would fit you could put them in between the plants and provide lighting for buds that form lower down.

Cannabis does need nutrients to produce a good crop, but it doesn't tolerate too rich a diet. If you read about using nutrients that aren't specifically mixed for cannabis, the usual advice is to mix it up half strength. I think this is why people often have problems with Miracle Grow, because it is quite strong to give an 'easy' and 'impressive' result for people's flowers and some food crops. By mixing the soil with something else or watering down the feed, you can make it more palatable for your growing plants. I grew my first plant in some spare multipurpose compost I found in the garage and just tap water, under CFLs, and it did fine.

A reasonable estimate of your expected yield would be about 100g per plant per kW of lighting power. If have 4x 60W bulbs, and three plants, that would work out at 2.5-3 ounces. If you mean that you have 4x bulbs and 60W of power total, you're looking at more like .5-1 oz. To get those kind of yields, you will need to have topped your plants once or twice, and you'll need to do some maintenance on them like LST and removing some leaves that cover buds from the light, and you'll also have to wait until they are fully matured not cutting them early because you really want to hurry up and smoke it.

Taking one last look at your setup, I am a little worried that lamp in the middle could be a halogen spot lamp. If it is, swap it out for another CFL. A halogen lamp will run too hot and waste too much power compared to the other bulbs, and because it casts light over a small angle it will soon only light only the very top leaves of your plant.

Oh, and is that tinfoil? It looks shiny, but it's not that great, and it keeps in a lot of heat. If it reflected a lot of light it would look white, but instead it looks grey with shiny bits. How about this: take off the tinfoil and paint the back and sides of your cabinet or shelf whatever it is, flat white. Not gloss, a couple of coats of matt white paint. It looks like you've got a shelf in there which doesn't come all the way out, so if you then painted another piece of wood or board white and fixed it to the front, it wouldn't be sealed and you would still have a lot of ventilation from the top. If your grow space is open like that all the time, a load of your light is just escaping off into the room. Then you'd have a grow box, all sides are light reflective, but heat can escape. Your tubes could be standing in the middle of the shelf lighting the plants where they face each other, and the CFLs above set to light the rest of the plants.

If you don't do any of that.... your grow will work out just fine, but light is pretty much the most important thing especially in a CFL grow where there's not a lot of it. It's hard to say for sure, but if we were to estimate that 20% of your light is needlessly wasted, for a grow like this that could add up to half an ounce of dried weed.