Hi all newbies! Just want to share with you all - very funny I think... An ignorant newbie, I'm growing a few pots to get the 'I've-grown-my-own-shit tee-shirt'. I've made EVERY newbie mistake possible - but hopefully I've learnt from them... I got 30 expensive beans from BC Seeds (W Widow, Northern Lights and da Purple); very excited coz we don't see much Indica this part of the world... ... I killed them all in ignorance; too-much-water; too-little-oxygen, too-much-sun. Too eager; wrong techniques! In desperation I asked my mother-in-law (she who knows everything-about-everything ), to germie some White Widow for me; she killed them in damp cotton wool a la beansprout - with chlorinated tap water! I love cooking; I watch TV chefs making pizza. They knead the dough; they tell you when 'it feels right'. But until you have felt 'good dough', you don't have 'the knack'... ... it took 40 pizzas for me, by trial-and-error, to learn how good dough should feel! Now I do it right every time... ... you can't learn how to make pizza by description; you have to learn hands-on. Similarly, descriptions of how to germie beans in paper towel tell you to keep them 'moist-but-not-too-wet'. But they don't explain EXACTLY what that means... That's how I killed most of my beans... ... overwatering! (Trying to 'be kind' to the poor little darlings.) Then one day I forgot to water them; that evening the top layer of paper towel was so dry that one could write on it with a pencil... (all the literature says don't let the paper dry out) ... so I thought there go my last few expensive beans! But I gave them some water from a medicine dropper anyway... ... and the next day both beans had sprouted! I was confused. What is 'moist-but-not-too-moist'? OK - with a little help from my friends on this forum I've got the knack of that... (But I killed my two successful sprouts with too much water / humidity once I'd potted them!) So I asked my gardener to score me some 'majiet' (Swazi grade 3 street-shit) seeds to practice on, before buying more of the real, expensive beans overseas. From the 50-odd green-and-brown seeds he gave me, I got 5 to germie. Picked them up carefully with sterilised tweezers and dropped them into a 1 cm chopstick-punched hole in a 2-litre gravel-lined plastic ice-cream container carefully filled with oven-baked, sterilised sand / potting-soil mix, with drainage holes punched in the bottom. Topped each hole with a little dry sand and a drop or two of water... Eureka! All five popped their darling little heads above the soil; I gave them a little CO2 (from a bicarb-vinegar mix in a small plastic container resting on the soil the other side of their plastic grow- box; I gave them sunlight (too much I think!) by leaving them on a shelf in the kitchen window for 3-4 hours of early-summer afternoon sun... .... they were doing well. Happy little chaps; forming new leaves each day... ... so I thought that at last i had 'the knack'; time to order the GOOD stuff! Then, last week, our area had the worst flooding in 20 years - 5 inches in 2 days. Rain like Noah's ark! My 4 cats didn't feel like going outdoors to make kitty-poos. So they urinated ammonia-cat-pee on my 5 precious seedling-experiments. All dead! Back to the drawing board... Except that I have made all the beginner's errors; next time 'I'll know how good dough feels!!' Here's another post I just made; grateful for any input! Thanks for the VERY informative post about cfl's. In South Africa our cfl's are warm white and cold white; 20 watt = 100 watt incandescent. Is that the same as Soft White (color temperature 2700k) and Daylight (color temperature 6500k)? For a small closet grow of say 8 plants, what works best - naked open-spiral cfl's, or overhead cfl spotlights? - which I can get in warm or cold types. I'm an absolute newbie, and doing this for fun, not commercially. So I want to grow several plants indoors in good soil not hydroponics. And I'm aiming for simple cost-effective quality, not high commercial yield. I've read a lot of (very confusing) material on the Internet about lighting… … the more I read, the more confused I become! My plan is to grow several potted plants on a shelf in a dark ventillated store-room, lined bottom-and-sides with 'dull-side-showing' aluminium foil. To conserve power while lighting the vegetative phase, I'd like to use a 24 hour mixture of cfl spotlights in cool and warm . I've also read a lot about top lighting and how this requires daily adjustment. The aim is to produce a plant with short internodes; top lighting encourages the plant to stretch UPWARDS; why can't I use my bank of cfl spots on the SIDE of my row of shelf-plants (slightly above), turning the pots say 90 degrees every day to ensure that all of the plant gets the same amount of light? To my newbie way of thinking, if you are lighting a single row of pots, having the lights directly above would encourage the plants to 'stretch upwards' towards the lights, producing a longer scraggy plant; if I pinch the apical nodes to discourage upward growth, wouldn't 'oblique-side' lighting encourage the plants to bush SIDEWAYS, with shorter internode distance...? Please forgive me if I'm being dumb, missing something... Peace...
I have never seen any advantage whatever in germinating seeds in a paper towel, it just adds a totally unnecessary extra step. I can list a number of disadvantages, and you have found a couple. I put my seeds about 4 mm deep in my compost mix, keep them moist and warm, they germinate in 1 to 5 days. If you were growing tomatoes or cacti you would do what it says on the packet and put them in soil - no reason to treat MJ differently.
When germinating seeds, it's best they are semi-heated. 80-85F works best IMO. This can be accomplished by using paper towels, distilled water, a tupperware container and placing the whole thing on a computer or television where it will stay warm and dark. For your lighting concerns, read my for lighting which can be found in my signature at the bottom of this post. It'll explain how to determine the correct amount of lighting you'll need and also go over things such as you should never pay any attention to the equivalent incandescent wattages and only use REAL wattage readings. If your using CFL's, the warm temps are what you'll use for flowering and the cool temps are what you'll be vegging with. The distance of the bulb from the top of the plant, and proper lighting will determine how your sprout grows. In the beginning you'll want your light only a few inches away from your sprout or it will stretch, fall over and die. You'll also need a fan blowing lightly on it to help promote stem strength. Hope this helps.
Good feedback; thanks. If you had to choose, would you use 'naked spiral' cfl's or cfl spots? My logic says that the reflective spot sends all the light where you want it...
when i germinated my seeds i put them in a shot glass to absorb water and then i put a black coffee mug over the shot glass for a day. i planted then they spouted the day after they were planted. you might want to try that.