Hi all. Hopefully, I've attached my picture files correctly. If I fumble a bit, I hope you'll bear with me. This is my first post here on GC or anywhere else for that matter. I haven't been able to find any good CURRENT grow chronicles using the popular 90 watt UFO grow lights, so I thought I may be able to provide one for anyone interested. I started growing again (after like 15 years). Got out my old MH 400W and started some seeds of unknown origin from a friend. A month later, I started a second batch using seeds from Nirvana – White Widow and Super Skunk, 2 of each, all feminized. I started those under the 400W MH, but changed to a 90W UFO at around day 12. Some preliminary notes: I bought my fake UFOs from AIBC for around $200 each. They use the 660's for red, 460s for blue, and I don't know what for orange. If you don't know what these numbers mean, you may have to do a little internet research (if you are so inclined). For veg-ing, I'm using an RB81. That means 8 red LEDs per 1 blue. They're 1 watt each, so of the 90, 80 are red and 10 are blue. For flowering, I am using the RBO711 units. O means orange, so there's 70 red, 10 blue, and 10 orange LEDs in each one of those. Like I said earlier, the Nirvana plants that I'm journaling here are my second batch. In the pcis, you may also catch a glimpse of the first batch every now and then in the background under the 400W MH. You can just ignore those for purposes of this journal. Hopefully, I'll be smoking those soon! My grow room went through massive transformations as I learned more and more and spent more and more money. That's why the lighting gets changed around for unobvious reasons during this grow. My grow room has now developed into a 2 level veg room and a separate flowering room. The veg stack is about 3 feet square. Level one is 6 feet tall. Level 2 is 3 feet (my basement has 9 foot ceilings). The top level for clones and seedlings just has 4 26W Daylight CFLs. The bottom level has 2 RB81 90W UFOs. The flower room has a 400W MH and 2 RBO711 90W UFOs. My soil is potting mix, blood meal, perilte, peat moss and lime. I use white vinegar to get my tap water down to around 7.0 pH (or maybe a little under that). I keep a 32 gal. trash can full. OK. Here we go. All four of these seeds sprouted on 12/3/09, which is day 1. Day 1 through day 12 was under the 400W MH set about 20 inches above the tops. Day 13 through day 42 was under a single RB81 90W UFO. Day 42 through today has been under 2 RBO711 90W UFOs. On around day 35, the Super Skunks started preflowering. By day 43, the White Widows finally developed some preflowers, and so that's when I first changed my flowering room to 12/12 lighting (which it will stay at from now on). Day 1 through 43 was done under 24/0 lighting. On day 44, I changed to 12/12 lighting. On day 55 (yesterday), I watered with Bat Guano (NPK = .5/12/.2). I used 2 tbs per gallon. About 1/2 gal for each plant. Today (1/28) is day 56 – Day 12 of flowering. Next week on around day 62, I will water with Humbolt's BushMaster to slow down the stretch and fill out the buds. I'll use 1/2 tsp per gallon of that. I do not intend to add anything else but water after that. According to another GC grower that I highly admire (Rumpleforskin), Nirvana's White Widow will be ready for harvest on day 60 of flowering. So the grow portion of this journal should be completed around March 15. I'll continue this post (although less wordy hopefully) throughout this grow. Here are the pics so far. I've only figured out how to attach thumbnails, so I guess you can't see the file names with the day counts. So I've listed them in order. I've figured out that you can click on the thumbnails to see the higher res pics, so this should be good enough. I'm more than willing to accept any grow tips that I might apply to the remainder of this grow or my future grows. Enjoy! 1. Day 6 2. Day 13 3. Day 18 4. Day 24 5. Day 30 6. Day 42 7. Flower day 2 (day 46) 8. Flower day 6 (day 50) 9. Flower day 12 (day 56 - today).
Damn, looking good man +rep Also i see this is your first post, welcome to the city (If your new anyway) lol
I'm interested to see how this turns out. I have great hopes for the future of LED lighting (My offroad truck lighting is pure LED by Vision X, and they smash any HID on the market), but have yet to see a crop grown to harvest under the current LED grow lights. It would be cool for you to set up a comparative grow using HID, HO or VHO tubes, and an LED setup. Keep us updated, and try to get some macro photos of the buds.
First post on GC and it's in the growing section...I feel proud to be a grower...oh, and welcome to the city man, girls look awsome.
Oops, my bad. I don’t know how to fix that at this point, as I for sure would like to complete this journal. Any suggestions? I feel like really stupid now, but things like this must be common when you’re dealing with potheads, right? Actually, I’m dry for the moment because I tested dirty at work, so I really have no excuse other than maybe inherited airheadedness.
OK. I did that, but apparently it hasn't been moved yet. Anyway... It's too soon to post an update, but I'd love to share a little of my setup. I stayed up too late last night writing the start of this post, so I think I'll just do this a little at a time from now on. My flowering room is under my front porch. It's completely encased by concrete all around. I had it wired for lights when I had my house built (10 years ago), but I didn't put in any vent holes. So I just extended the door jam with a 2 x 8 board and put a 6" in-line duct fan at the top to vent out (into my veg room) and a 4" in-line duct fan at the bottom blowing air from the floor in. There's a bunch of fans in the room keeping it all circulating and it appears to be working out well. The first photo is still during my room construction (before light-proofing), but you can see what I did. You'll also see a cheap carbon filer I made using two duct flanges, hardware cloth, duct tape and a $10 pet odor control carbon filter (easily replaceable). I made four of these and they really keep the odor in check – I don't smell anything outside of the room and no one has ever mentioned a skunky odor in my house. Two are just hanging in the flower room sucking air through and adding to the circulation, so even in the room, the odor is light. I've grown before without them, so I know they're making a big difference. Besides the $30 6†250cfm in-line duct fan from Home Depot and the $10 filter, the rest of each one cost around $10. Inside the room, the end that I'm growing in is 40†wide by 7' deep and 9' tall. The outer end that leads to the door is around 5' x 6'. As you can see, and as I failed to mention previously, I use a boat load of vertical cheap 40watt flouros (11 pairs). It is my belief that these will help with the lower and side bud production. That seemed to be the case when I used them like that 15 years ago anyway. I guess we'll see as the grow comes along. I'll end it here and expand on this later. I have to say, it's awfully fun sharing my secret room so openly!
I took the camera down to the grow room to see if I could figure out the macro thing. I did and here's a shot of one of the Super Skunks. It's now day 13 of flowering, day 57 from seed pop.
Here's an update. They're now in day 16 of flowering, day 60 since seed pop. As I said before, these are 2 Nirvana Super Skunks and 2 Nirvana White Widows. I gave three of them BushMaster today (1/2 tspn / gal). One of the WWs is 3 inches shorter than the rest, so I just gave that one straight water. It'll be interesting to see if that makes it catch up and pass the others in height. Any way, here's the update pic:
63 days old and 19 days into flowering - another group photo and a close-up of each. It's crazy, I could never see a difference between the White Widows and the Super Skunks - except that the SS's pre-flowered a week earlier. I'm hoping that Nirvana didn't pull a fast one and send me the same strains for both - like maybe they just automatically substitute SS for WW, when they're out if WW, or visa-versa. However, the seed bags were labeled - I got 10 SSs and 10 WWs. Does anyone know, are these two strains closely related such that they won't show differences until late flowering? Here's the pics -
These four plants were previously together on a rolling table. Yesterday, I put each on its own roller and moved the outer UFO 6 inches out. So from now on, I'll show separate photos of each plant. Also, I figured out my camera was only taking 1MB pics, so I upped that to 3MB. My macro photos got a lot better with that change. Here thay are on day 22 of flowering, 66 days old.
dude that is awsome! goes to show that a little ingenuity can go a long way. congratulations to your bad self!
Thanks, Possum. It's nice to get some positive feedback along the way. It's nice just to know that someone else is actually seeing this!
I like it. I'm jealous of your grow area. A basement would be perfect. You are not alone here in using cheap ufo's. I use ebay chinese ufo's too. I think you're right in adding the T5's. I added a UVB CFL bulb (Used by reptile keepers) and I'm pretty sure it made a difference. I also added an infra-red bulb as well to get all the wavelengths. Your plants look fine and I'll certainly be following your progress.
Hey Broadside, thanks for joining and your kind words. I just finished going throuigh your Diesel / Poison Dwarf thread. That was amazing! Excellent work, man. Stay tuned. I think I'm looking at a mid-March harvest.
Nice set up. Wish I had that much room. Looks cool with all those flouros lol. Those plants are beautiful.
Thanks, Budley. There's even more room in there - another 5' x 7', but heat levels and circulation issues make it hard to expand on it. Who knows though, when I get a few complete grows under my belt, I may even want to replace the 400W HID with 4 or more additional 90W UFOs. Please stay tuned for more updates. Also, I'll try to show a little of my vegging setup. It's hard to find time to cruise GC and update posts lately - too much shit going on!