Hello, I used to be an under the radar grower, but now since laws have favorably changed in my state I can come out of the shell. I am lucky enough to live in an area where cultivating 6 plants is legal. I used to live in California where you could grow as many plants in a 100 sq ft area w a doctor's referral, so needless to say I had to change my strategy from sea of green to big hearty plants to ensure a good yield. From keeping 120 clones constantly going in CA, I learned a lot about how to keep things cost effective without sacrificing quality. I have probably done 50-60 grows before this, so I would consider myself a novice-expert grower who likes to keep things simple so I can still go out of town once in a while. The first grow I will discuss is hydro without the complications of pumps etc, and the next grow I will discuss is organic soil which actually had a better result for dollars spent. STRAINS: BLUE DREAM, BIO-SKUNK, STRAWBERRY COUGH, BLUEBERRY SET UP: CFL's for veg, one 400watt HPS to start, then add 2nd towards end, Botanicare ProGrow and Bloom organic nutes I was new to the area, and thought I couldn't afford the time to buy seeds through a bank. I went onto craigslist of all places, and found a clone dealer who seemed to have good genetics, always look for them explicity saying F1 phenotype, disease and bug free guanarateed etc. If you get bad clones/seeds, your starting to run a marathon with cramps/problems that will almost ensure no sucess. If I have learned anything from growing, ALWAYS SPEND THE EXTRA FEW BUCKS OR TIME TO ENSURE SUBPERB GENENTICS. That is a varition of a quote from Ed Rosenthal. After a sketchy meeting in a petco parking lot, I rushed the babies home to their already set up space of approx 100 watts of CFL White spectrum lighting. I like to use heat meats for the first few days just to ensure vigoruous root growth, but this is not necessary. I went into 1 gallons and clay pellots/perlite and stuck to purified water for the first week. I found great sucess of getting one of those filters you attach to your sink, gets the water quality under 20ppm and actually fills up pretty quick. I used clay pellots as the medium, and also punched additional holes in the one gallon containers so the roots could easily get through. I kept the nusery trays full of 1/2-1" of nutrient solution as this takes the guess work out of giving the perfect amount of nutrients. If your growing hydro, might as well take advantage of the good parts I say. The plants responded amazingly well to this set up, I was seeing 2" even 3" of growth some days. (two weeks later) From here I knew I wanted to stay hydro, as you do have the option of bailing out and transplanting into soil with this method. I had 12 plants, and I knew the closet space was limited so I decided to get 10 gallon smart pots, and put 3 clones in each one. I don't know if I would recoomend this method as it kind of puts the eggs into one basket, but I was very contricted on space and I did not expect the clones to grow so vigorosly during veg(definitely a good problem to have though). From here I just water a nutrient solution every day from a 2 gallon pumper, PLEASE GET ONE OF THESE if you are still using a hand action sprayer for more than 2 plants(10 bucks at home depot and saves sooooo much time). (Three weeks from last pic, now one week into flower) -DAY 58 total of grow, day 31 of flower- (DAY 65 of Grow, day 38 of flower) The Yield was a little disappointing, around 150 g's for 12 plants..... the blue dream was by far the best, and the blue berry had some issue I ended up cooking with it. Blue dreams matured very quickly, around 7 weeks and everything else about 8-9 weeks PROS: plants take exactly the amount of nutes they need, very cost effective, can re-use the clay pellots for another grow, organic hydro made easy, blue dream MISTAKES: no c02, heat - two things that have a direct impact on yield