First Grow, Need Some Help.

First thing to do is set some realistic goals. Since this is your first grow, there will be mistakes and learning experiences.

Honestly your first grow needs to:
- Keep a plant alive.
- Maintain the plant with minimal stress to it.
- Breaking in your grow box/room
- Honing in temps / humidity
- Hopefully produce "some" bud.

Most of your answers can be found by simply reading the stickies. Just know that there aren't surefire answers for your specific grow, you'll need to learn them as you go with help from us.

Strain genetics is the largest factor for good bud. If you use bag seed it will probably grow, but honestly it won't have the same baseline potential as a known good strain.

If you want bud, the males have gotta go. They won't produce bud and will pollinate the females in the same area, which in turn creates the seeds in bud (which you don't want for smoke).

Walmart is your friend. They have everything for a basic grow, and have free ship to store for those online items.

Simple walmart suggestions:
Medium: Premium Soil with Perlight (60% / 40%)
Lights: CFL (Walmart doesn't carry HPS)
Nutes: GH 3-Stage (online not Walmart)
Fan: 200-600cfm
Container: 16oz & 3 gal
Meters: A PPM meter and pH meter
Thermometer & RH meter

Try to stay away from time release soils / nutes like Miracle Grow.

Just keep it simple.


-FragileBob

 

Its my first grow and I currently have an berry ryder auto 3 days old! In dwc 5 gal bucket, 20 gal air pump, 6" airstone, rockwool cube, clay pellets, ff 3 pack, 150 watt hps on 12/12.. Any help with the whole grow process, nute schedule,best yeild possible, any tips or advice deeply appreciated!!! Thanks..

 

KILL ALL MALES. it will pollinate ya bitches and that SUX BIG TIME. if u see balls give em the chop. Get pure organic soil with no slow release ferts. Get a cheap bottle of pure organic ferts. Don't feed any ferts or nutes for 2-3 weeks. Make sure your organic nutes bottle is higher in N than P and K. In flower it's the opposite. Don't adjust ph in organic soil. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

 

U need to start ur own thread mate.

 

I'd agree with just about all of that, but I would recommend picking up a cheap aquarium pH kit so you can adjust the pH of your water. If you're using tap water in a city, there's a good chance that it's in the 7.6-8 range so it won't leach metal out of the pipes. Unfortunately, this means that unless the pH is adjusted at least every once in awhile it will pull your soil pH up and start to lock out Magnesium. If you add a little lemon juice or vinegar to your water you can bring the pH back down to about 6.6 and then you're golden.

 

The thing about the slow release nutes in soil is most people like to add the nutes themselves as you can work around any sort of problem. (Burnt leaves/ deficiencies/ph lock out) if you use the slow release you would have to wait the 2,4,some are 9 month release. To get to a point where adding full strength nutrient would be deemed same without causing burns. I've had this problem so what i did is got the soil with the least amount. And used 1/8 amount of FOx farm trio plus half of the micronutrients to form good bacteria on the roots. MORE ROOT MORE FRUIT. Anyway you can always make your own using peat moss perlite and dolomite all available at lowes and Home Depot. As far as lights I started with CFL 100 watt equivalent DAYLIGHT 6500k kelvin temp bulbs in clamp lights with Y dividers (2 bulbs per clamp light) X 3. So that's 6 cfl lights for 3 plants. Then got a metal halide from a friend and built a bigger cab keep it up and you will be a pro in no time. Share your knowledge. Overgrow the world!

 

You can get a ph meter and check your tap water levels witch is a good thing. If it is a little hard say around 8. Chuck a air stone in a bucket of tap water and leave it bubble for a couple days. This will bring down ph and if and when you add nutes it will drop lower. So in most cases no need to adjust ph with ph down. Always good to let ph fluctuate in soil within say one full point. Eg. 6.0-7.0

 

Do you mean the soil pH? I have to assume you know how to test your water pH, given what you've posted.

Soil pH is a bit difficult to determine; a lot of people used to test run-off, and probably still do, but I stopped doing it because it didn't give an accurate reading because the run-off isn't clear, and run-off pH isn't necessarily a good indicator of soil pH. I just pH-adjust my water to about where I want it and figure that over time my soil pH will be pulled into a desirable range.

 

Thanks for this info. I test runoff and its usually a full ph point higher so 6.4 goes to 7.4. It seems fairly consistent to be a point higher run off wise but I have no data to check and see if that is what others are getting. Now that I know it means Diddley I can stop
Doing it and / or not care as much. Thanks! Learn something every day!

 

Well, it doesn't really mean diddly, it's just hard to interpret the data. It has occurred to me that if one were to test the input water pH and the run-off pH, it would potentially shed light on what's going on in the soil. A full point difference seems to imply that you have a basic soil. It's still difficult to infer everything that's going on in your soil, but it does give you some information as far as true soil pH is concerned. I would suspect that as time progresses, if you keep using water at 6.4, the runoff would begin to creep down in that direction. I would be interested to see if this is actually the case.

 

How do I start my own thread??