My first grow

Nice! I like to use cfls for small plants or t5s for bigger and better. If you want to keep them short, do some lst on them after about 3 or 4 nodes. Be gentle and do a little planning ahead. Lst can turn a little plant into a bush real quick. The roots will develop better if you have black pots, or at least cover the cups with dark paper. Good luck!!

 

Is that 60 actual watts or equivalent? Because you need atleast 100 actual watts minimum to keep you where should be at my opinion ofc(not for seedlings i only use 46w lol but it works) and with cfls try and keep em 2-5 inches away so they dont stretch tall and lanky like you said but for seedlings i do 1-2 inch away no prob just check every few hours. For lights veg in mostly daylight cfls but good to mix maybe 2 cool whites in the mix, for flower stick with mostly cool whites and maybe again 2 or 3 daylights. For daylight cfls get the 6500k output and cool whites are 2700k. Goodluck def subbing to your grow later dude

 

Here's an example of lst in its early stages. This is sour diesel.
Be gentle but firm and bend those ladies over (without snapping them). Tie her down with some hemp string or tomatoe ties or something of that sort. Tie down new branches as the grow. The goal is to keep all your tops at the same hight, and increase your amount of colas.
The second picture is what lst can lead to. This was 4 plants in a 4x4 tent. One of the plants ended up getting culled and made much more room for the other 3. These plants ended up to be about 2sq ft.

 

How soon is toon soon to lst plants?!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Dont start lst until you have 3 or 4 nodes.

 

OK, to answer any of that...we need some definitions...lol.


First, what do you mean by "best way to keep them short"? How short? They're autoflowering, so you don't want to be topping or anything once they start trying to bloom, and they'll grow up to 50% WHILE blooming, depending on conditions.

Do you plan to grow them in "tiny plant in a Solo cup" conditions, or are you going to move to a bigger container? How much room you give the roots has a LOT of impact on how big your plant is capable of getting, to begin with.

Are you wanting to bush them out, or just keep them from getting too tall?

How much, and what kind, of light do you intend to give them throughout their growth?




That said...I'll say, in regards to light, what the guy who runs my hydro shop says about CFL, simply because I MOSTLY agree, and it's hilariously well put:

"Want to know how good your CFL will work for growing happy plants? Drop it on the sidewalk from 10 feet up, it's going to be about as effective after the fall as it was before".


That's an exaggeration, but if you use a light meter, you'll understand. For that matter, if you can do maths, you'll get it. The lumens the manufacturer claims are rarely accurate...those are "best possible test conditions" figures AT THE BULB SURFACE.

Light falls off by the square. The light intensity you get at 1 yard, to be matched at 10 yards, takes 100 times the power if the same type of source is used. In other words, if you get 300 lumens at 3 feet with a 100 watt bulb, and you move the bulb to 30 feet, you need a 10,000 watt bulb to get a 300 lumen reading at the same point.

So a 1600 lumen bulb at even 1 inch will give 1/324th of that from 18 inches. 4.9 lumens. This applies to ALL light sources.

CFLs are cheap, and easy, and cost less in electricity than many other methods...but a light spectrometer will also show you that it's far more intense in "useless" bands, and lacking quite a bit in intensity balances for bands the plants actually use, in natural environments. Doesn't make them useless as my hydro guy says, but it DOES mean they're lacking.

No matter what anyone else tells you (including me), a tiny bit of study shows that no light system out there currently is without its weaknesses or drawbacks. My advice for coping with that is DON'T use just a single type of system...build a hybrid system that uses two or more that back one another up AND do their best to cover the shortcomings of each.

At which point, "cheap" becomes a case of "do you mean in what it costs off the shelf, in frequency of replacement, or in costs of use?".

 

For an 18", non bushy, short cycled plant, even a 2 gallon or a 1.5 gallon planter pot's fine.

My first indoor plant grew under a single LED bulb directly over it, and incandescent grow bulb at ceiling height, in a 10" by 10" by 6" pot from the gardening section (a 6 gallon bucket is 12 inches diameter, 14 inches height), and I was having to argue with it to keep it from topping 2 feet without bushing to about 28" in diameter...daily side trimming, LST, and topping as needed.

The yield sucked in both quality and quantity in those conditions, but the plant itself was healthy enough.

The yellowish color can come from multiple issues...most likely is a nutrient issue, though...probably too little, not too much.

 

Ahoy!
So reading up on what's happened so far...
A nice start! Plants look happy enough. Be prepared though, these thing love light, so get it into your head that you can never have enough lol.

So brushing up on recent topics... The root mass essentially dictates the size of your plant so keeping that in mind, if you have the room... I would suggest 5 gallon pots. They are a great medium for begginers. The are large enough to retain moisture for days, even with larger plants. And alow you to properly grow a pretty impressive sized plant. (If you can support that much growth with proper lightng)

Have you decided on a nute line yet?

 

MH and HPS HIDs are traditional....but I'll list the known lighting systems most often purchased and endorsed with their drawbacks and advantages for you.

Natural sunlight averages at sea level on the planet are the equivalent of 120 "watts" per sq meter of direct light. This is where most people get the "100 watts per plant" rule of thumb, but they fail to consider a lot while doing so.

First thing being that, as I noted, light has a square of the distance fall-off And the sun's a LONG damn way off. So 120 watts at 6 feet and 120 watts at ground are what you get in that circumstance, since the proportionate difference in distance is truly insignificant.

Same's not true with any form of lightbulb. If your light is a square of the distance change from source, and your source is 8.3 light minutes away, you still get the square of the distance change, but that effect is....minimal...in 6 feet.

Mostly because, despite it being "120 watts per sq meter", watts is defined as the energy used to do work, technically speaking. In the case of lights, it's a combination of the light and the heat produced. If your proportionate heat release isn't a 1:1 ration, then the LIGHT isn't a 1:1 ratio...they MUST balance.  
128x10³lux light intensity is what actually reaches the ground. 1 lux is one lumen per sq meter. 128,000 lumens for every square meter of footprint, in daylight sunlight spectrum.

Good luck matching that with ANY indoor light setup that doesn't instantly burn down the building...lol. A 1000 watt MH bulb throws 100,000 lumens AT SOURCE. Distances are close enough that every inch IS affected by that square of the distance increase in a significant way.

Normal purposes, "the increment between zero and one is equal to the increment between 99 and 100"...but anyone with any experience in the real world knows this isn't true in anything but counting how many of something you have, or measuring a set distance, where the relationship is linear.The difference between driving 1mph from 0 mph, and driving 56 from 55 is equal (except for the cost of the speeding ticket if the cop's a prick). But what's the difference in how the car handles because of wind resistance?

THAT is a "square of the increment" progression, in practice. You don't want to drive your Toyota Corolla at 100MPH (if you can get it there), because it'll try to become a hovercar. But it handles 75 fine, if loose, and 55 perfectly.

Make sense?

Now HID bulbs are powerful, in terms of lux. But they consume a LOT of energy, and put off a LOT of heat (which is wasted energy). A 1000 watt one with a good digital ballast adds about 1.04kWh per hour on to your electric bill (draws 10.4 amps, or a total of 1040 watts). Startup is slightly more wasteful, but that only matters when calculating amperage for circuits.

On an 18 hour cycle, that's 18.2 kWh/dy. The average US household draws about 40 kWh per day, average electric bill is $120 +/-
So that is half again your electric bill, close enough. Call it $60 extra dollars a month.

But it delivers 50 times the lux a 100 watt incandescent will, not 10. So if you have a 23/100W CFL, it's rated to put out the same lumens a 100 watt incandescent does, while using only 23 watts. Your 1600 lumens CFL compared to 80K lumens HID at the same standardized distance for rating.

Let's figure that for fall-off:

1600 lux at 1 inch from bulb, 18 inches off, turns into 4.9 lux. The HID, though has the same 1:324 proportion...247 lux (this is where the light is direct...the stuff reflected off the hood is weaker).

In return, your power consumption and heat output are 45 times higher. Since the math says if you used 45 of those bulbs to match wattage, you'd only have 221 lux direct light, equal heat, and equal power consumption...you see the advantage there...on top of the fact the HIDs have "healthier light balances" in terms of wavelengths.

As you see, though, even the 1000 watt bulb delivers less than 2/3 sunlight power AT SOURCE. and a buttload less at 18 inches away.

But you can't go a WHOLE lot higher without having the heat and light intensity where it's closest to the plant ruin the plant....and too very much lower, your fall-off means the BOTTOM of your plant "starves" for light. A 400 watt MH, for instance, tests at 32,000 lux, close enough.

These are TESTED, not "claimed"...the claims are made based off calculations that ignore inefficiencies. Basically "physics 101" calculation formula. If we ever get truly heatless light, then that rating will mean something real, not comparative. And then, only because ohm's law will still apply, and we'll still use "watts" to define, despite the fact the REAL significant figures will be voltage and current define resistance, and resistance and current, or resistance and voltage will define power used in watts". Because none of the power to do work will have converted to heat...it'll all be light.

With me so far?


OK...so HID bulbs deliver a higher number of lumens for the wattage compared to a CFL, even in true watts, so the effects of fall-off are also not as significant. But you get a LOT of heat to contend with. Especially since they put off more IR than a CFL (SOME IR is necessary).

Same with fluorescent bars...they're the same thing as CFLs, in a different configuration, really.

HIDs are short in the UV spectrums, though, and by nature are heavier in the "daylight" spectrums, despite being so "white"....lots of orange, yellow, and green, while the plants use very little orange, almost no yellow, and no green (they REFLECT green, not use it...that's why they look green).

Our sun is primarily yellow-orange in visible light spectrum. What we see "in normal color", if it appears to look pretty much like it would outside on a sunny day, the light being used has almost as heavy a "payload" of yellow-orange. "Waste light".

LEDs are rated in both "true watts" and "effective watts". True watts are what they use as a unit or as an individual diode, as defined by Ohm's Law. "Effective watts" are measured by how many lumens each diode produces at standardized testing distances.

Problem being that they function by being dozens of small sources spread over a given area...100 1 watt LEDs simply can't fit in the space a 100 watt lightbulb does. Even, when you follow manufacturer claims based on the fact that there's no "waste light", so intensity can be compared based on how much "red wavelength" would be in the tested lumens from a 100 watt bulb, and their red bulb gives off 4 times the amount of red light a 100 watt incandescent will, it doesn't matter...they can all be red, it's STILL only the number of lumens it tested for. And a low enough number that fall-off is a more significant issue. This is the WHY of "LEDs have poor penetration"

However, at the same time, since it IS targeted wavelength light, all wavelengths the plant uses, not wastes, what DOES reach the plant is used more effectively...so you can safely assume twice the true wattage in effect for the same number of tested lumens. The more "channels" (different wavelengths of LED) available, the more true this is, and the closer to the "3 to 4 times true wattage in effect" they get. Simple explanation for this is if you have a 3 channel...red, white, and blue, at 4.5nm, 1k(white), and 8.4nm, those are the only wavelengths the plant gets...it would USE everything between 9.6 and 6.8, and between 3.6 and 4.8, plus a bit of the 4.8 to 6.8, and a bit of the IR above 9.6, and a bit of the UV below 3.6 for energy...but it doesn't get them TO use.


See how involved this gets?

So essentially, you have to figure out how to control heat to deliver the number of lux you need to cover your footprint all the way to the ground (penetration), deal with power consumption, deliver the RIGHT bandwidths, all in one go...and cope with any problems doing so creates, in the process.


Up to you on HOW you manage this. But there's WHAT you have to manage, and why.

 

Nute is nutrients, yes...I suggest Fox Farms products...I know for a FACT they give you what they claim, in balances, the instructions are easy, being a liquid, you have precise control of dosage with proper uptake (dry nutes, the concentration is strongest next to it, and weakest farthest from it, as it's dissolved in water and distributed, so you don't know if it's distributing properly, risk root burn, and risk starving and killing outlying roots).



Back on the lights...I'm in the process of building a righ for my old 4 by 4 tent just for shits and giggles I think would trip you out. Most people aren't in a position to do this, but if it works...


If it's not obvious, I'm a science geek. Worked construction for a long ass time, ended up going to school for an engineering degree eventually, and discovered numbers just fascinate me.

So I'm in the process of acquiring splitters and spinning mirrors...I want to try using laser intensity diodes...they don't have them in the wavelengths I need outside of three different red ones...but a green laser laser pointer isn't green, it's IR run through a frequency doubling crystal, so I can solve bandwidth issues the same way (an 8nm red run through the exact same projection crystal becomes a 4nm blue).

If I'm RIGHT (and so far, numbers say I am), I can produce the necessary power as measured in lumens to fix penetration issues...but by using modulating spinning mirrors and a set of splitters, I can "pan" the beams over the plants at high speed, so all leaves, and the WHOLE of each exposed leaf gets enough light, without having it build up to "heat".


The world's first set of plants grown during a 6 month Led Zepplin laser show, in effect.