Hi frands! Long time lurker, first time grower! So excite. I hope to make this an impromptu and skimmable grow journal, so I'll try to check in with regular updates, especially now as these babies are bushin' up and I'm getting super pumped. Weigh in with any & every bit of advice or tips that you have! These are just some bagseed experiments to start with before buying some awesome seeds, so just trying to get all the details to come together best as possible. + Setup Friend gave us 400W metal halide light + shebang. Running it on 275W at the moment because I'm a wuss/scared of heat burn. (Thoughts here? Figured I'd bump it up to 400W when they're larger and our exhaust fan's installed. Is there a huge downside to running it at 275W for a bit?) Have this in a 3x5x8 closet, temps 70-77F, 30-50% RH. + Germ/Soil Germinated in solo cups and Miracle-Gro seedling start soil on 4/22. Transplanted already to 3gal fabric pots in an (no-name) organic potting soil. + Water/PH Truth be told, I only started measuring PH very recently (rookies, amirite?), so I'm still not seeing a full picture here. Tap water PH is about 7.0, but my run-off seems super acidic. My first time watering & checking PH (May 8), I didn't think about the fact I needed to measure 'em all separately, so all my runoff together measured at 5.0 - what the fuck! My 5/11 watering/feeding run-offs measured 5.0PH, 6.5PH (my worst looking plant?), 5.0PH, and 6.0PH. I had proactively raised the watering/nute combo to 7.5PH though, because I was concerned from the first run-off PH. + Nutes First nute feeding was 5/11 at 1/3rd the recommended amount, using DynaGro Grow formula. Loving it so far, and I feel like everything is going great for being a little under a month along. Really hoping two of these at least end up being females and I can possibly get some tasty bud in the end here. One of my plants is looking like it either got hit with heat burn (light was originally about 4" closer to the plants) or developing nitrogen deficiency, but the other three (oddly, the three seeds that came from one different source) looking great. So, yup, here we are! Again, just newbing it up, getting a feel for the curve without busting out a whole bunch of bucks. Next round will be with some beefy autofem seeds and all the good shit like FoxFarm and such, but for now, keeping it simple for this stupid. Hope you enjoy, please kick me if you see me hurting my plants throughout this process!
Hey looks good im a newbie too and one of my first mistakes was not filling the pot all the way almost to the top with soil give the roots room to grow better and faster.. Sent from my SM-G360T1 using Tapatalk
No. If you had cranked that thing up and threw it over brand new seedlings, it would've probably fried them. So you did right by that. I would hang the light high in the beginning and as the plants grow and get stronger, crank up the power. MH is great light for veg but it's hot, so make sure you can keep your temps within a reasonable range. Always fill your containers up. No matter what you're using, you're wasting valuable root space for your plant. The roots are sort of the brain or nerve center for the plant and you've got to keep them happy. They don't like to sit in moist conditions, thus the type of soil we use to grow them in, and you let them get DRY...almost dead dry...before you water. A new plant takes a lot longer to use up a lot of water than a large, more established plant. If it doesn't feel like it's dead dry, it's not time to give more water. pH needs to be within a range of 6.3 to 6.7 going in. I've found that if I control the pH of the water going in, I don't have to worry about what's coming out the pot. There is actually a specific way you're supposed to do to measure the pH of run off, so unless you've stumbled upon it somewhere, you're probably not getting a true reading anyway. Just make sure that whatever method you use to measure the pH of your water, it's giving a good true reading. There are the cheap pH kits with the container you put drops in and go by color which some people use and do well with...I hated them. A cheap pH tester isn't with the time you took to look at the ad for it and you can lay money on the fact that it will give you erroneous readings or maybe not work straight out of the box...but hey, what can you expect for $13.00, right? The Cadillac of pH testers is about $80 and is made by BlueLab. Best money I ever spent. LOL They work fast and are accurate and easy to store and deal with. But whatever you're using, make sure it's right. Our tap pH is right at 7.0 99.9% of the time. But I check it every time I draw water. Beware of nutes. The plants don't really need nutes until they've had a chance to use up what came in the soil and I saw above where you're using MG which is loaded with slow release fertilizers. That's probably what caused the crispy leaves on your plants. Did you add any perlite to the mix? If you didn't, it wouldn't hurt to add some more....better drainage. But take it easy on the nutes, especially since you just up potted them into more fresh soil which is like giving them a new batch of slow release fertilizer. Always let the plant outgrow the container before you repot or go larger. It needs to be slightly root bound and will always be larger (wider and taller) than the container it's in when this is the case. But if you're going to continue to use the MG soil, always take into account that it's stronger than the normal grow soils and you'll need to let the plant use what's in the soil each time before you hit them up with more. I'm not a big fan of pouring my plants full of chemicals. I've found over the years that by using very good grow soil and using good potting methods, I can make it almost all the way through veg before I hit them with nutes. I start small and repot up in size 2 or 3 times during the veg cycle (we're on a 10 week cycle) and by the time a batch finishes flowering, I've taken clones and gotten them to the size I need them to be to flower...so it's a constant rotation. One last thing...you have a 400 watt light. As your plants grow and become larger, you might run into some shading issues...depending on the strain you're growing. A good buddy of mine grew off 2 under a 600 watt switchable MH/HPS light and he ran into problems getting enough light down into his plants. But he was growing feminized blueberry which is like growing a shrub because it's node spacing is so tight. But you really don't help yourself by flowering 4 plants in a space or with light only sufficient to handle 2. Lighting is the key to big healthy plants and large dense buds. The size and density of your buds is directly proportional to the amount of good strong lighting they get during the flower cycle and crowding them together just prevents anything under the canopy from being able to develop much. But once you grow a round or two and figure out the basic system and routine of it all, it's just repeat, repeat, repeat. But read up all you can on the "how to grow" part of the process. The more informed you are, the better the outcome. Happy growing! TWW
Wow! I didn't even notice how much lower the soil is compared to others' grows! I'll fix that right away, thanks for catching! Another poster mentioned adding some perlite too, so I'm going to wait until they dry up a bit more from the last watering, and then add more soil with a slight amount of perlite mixed in to the base of the pots to lift them up.
Thanks a TON!! This is amazing advice. I've been following the guides of growweedeasy.com, but only the pros at GC have details like you mentioned. I'm going to back off the nutes big time, too, and try to get a TDS tester soon to get a better idea of what PPMs I'm working with at the moment with this MG fertilizer soil. I was thinking that my light even at 400W was probably way too small for 4 flowering plants, but they're crap bagseed so I'm just assuming/thinking that I'm going to lose 1 or 2 to the dreaded balls. It's just a practice run anyways, so I'll happily kill one off to give the others the proper amount of room. Thanks again for the awesome tips!!
Alrighty, filled up their buckets more with an organic soil/perlite mix, and set up a better stand that I can just water & let it drain through. After filling it up with partly new soil, they dried out quicker, and was ready for a watering in 2 days. Draining into the little buckets works pretty well! I can measure & test each run-off water separately perfectly. Run-offs with the new soil were back to a little shitty, around 5.0-6.0PH. Hopefully after a few more waterings the soil can get a little flushed out and running off in a more normal range. My one plant keeps getting crispier and crispier. The other three, that are doing awesome and thrivin', are from a different bagseed that I think was a much heartier strain. The one plant was from a seed in mostly hermied/white-green bagseed. So who knows, maybe it's just a bitch.
Plants are boomin' in growth! Even the crispy one, but the leaves don't look a lot better (no worse though - small victories!) But the run-off measuring at 5.0PH is bothering me, and I think I'm beginning to see some PH/nutrient deficiency spots on the leaves on my nice plants. I was considering doing a normal water next (in probably about 2 days or so) test the run-off, and if it measures again at about 5.0PH, then flush it. If it measures at about 6.0PH, then leave it as is. My water is about 7.0PH without adjustment, which I've been using given how acidic the soil seems to be. Does this sound like a good plan, or would anybody suggest anything different? Luckily once I get past the learning curve of just rearin' these little bush babies up, next time around I'll be doing this with grade-A femmed seeds & awesome FoxFarm soil, so no worries. Just wanted to be cheap & quick for the practice run.
Hot diggety! So on 5/22, I did end up flushing two of the four plants. (In the picture, it was front right, and back left). Their run-off was still measuring at a spicy 5.0PH, though it seemed like back left was a bit higher - maybe 5.5PH. Definitely not in the sexy 6's though! But, the flush doesn't seem to have done anything but electrified them, and they're all sitting at a gravy 6.0-6.5PH now! Well, by all, I mean all three, and then the little bitch ass plant in the back. Now that I'm working with a more ideal PH range, next watering they're going to munch on some nutes, too! I have also noticed little gnats buzzing now too, but very few, so I'm adding some diatomaceous earth to the top of each pot tonight. At some point, I'll likely have to deal with the fact that my 400W light probably isn't the best for ALL four of these plants. So, if they ended up ALL four being female, and I chose to let the two least-awesome ones sit further out of the light's best reach, will they just grow a bit slower? Or could this potentially stress them to the point of becoming males? I don't want to risk any hermies, and I'll happily hack the one shitty plant to death, but if it's feasible to maintain the 3, I'd like to. Next up is adding an exhaust fan & carbon scrubber to the mix, and in a week or less, we're going 12/12 on these fuckers. So far the fans have kept the temperature down just fine, and the smell hasn't been too potent (and it's a very private grow anyways, so no requirements of being ridiculously stealthy). Really digging this process, and happy everything has come out so well so far - for a brainless DIY I-have-like-half-my-stuff closet grow, this has been really fun and pretty successful, and can't wait to get going on a more "pro" scale. Smoking it ain't addictive, but damn, I think growing it might be! Pics attached of current status, AND - is that a pistil I spy?! EDIT: After cruising around ya'll's threads and pics of what your pre-flower stage plants are at.. I'm flowering ASAP! I think I let them get a little too big already. Fixing my light leak(s) though today, and will start 12/12 in 1-2 days.
Feeding/watering time with update pics! Really good run-off PH - all within 6.0-6.5PH. Also started 12/12 today, and everything needed for the exhaust/scrubber is shipping to me Wed. Deciding that for next time around, going with bubble/hydroponics.
Update pics today! All PH run off is sitting pretty and consistent in the 6.0-6.5PH range for all plants, and all are now sexed (for now anyways, unless I screw up and herm 'em)! Had one male in the bunch, which was a pretty tall one, and I chucked it this evening. The rest all have obvious pistils in the tippity-top new growths, so I'm happy as a daisy. They are so leggy and sparse, so I really wish I would have paid more attention during their big veg growth spurts and trained them, but ah well. They're pretty damn healthy looking regardless. Just got my HPS light in, as well as the new exhaust fan & carbon scrubber build (DIY'ing it, I'll post more details on that once it's built), so the room will get some nice upgrades this weekend I can report back on. Lowered the little stands they're on to give them lots more room under the light. Temps are great though already, and I don't see any heat burn whatsoever, but my humidity is sitting at about 50%, so good that the fan's going to be in soon to prevent any moisture issues during actual bud production. Also checked the pot of the ditched male for any root boundness because I probably should have transplanted before flowering them (currently in 3gal fabric pots), but luckily it looked like it still had a good amount of room to work with in that plant - so hopefully that remains true for the remaining three. I didn't see any roots getting close to air pruning yet, so hopefully that remains true for the remaining cycle. I plan on taking it easy on the nutes due to this concern. Glad that I'm getting the training wheels off, but DAYUM. Next grow is going to be completely different - I plan on basically doing the full DWC/bubble-bucket set-up (growweedeasy.com) and mainlining technique. Either way, excited to see what this will yield in the end.
Day 10 of flower! Watered/fed today, and also switched to the proper HPS bulb now, too. Baby buds bursting all around, and I think I'm going to start lightly pinning down some of the bigger fan leaves like I've been reading. Everything still looks good and super healthy though! They're all stretching like crazy, too, they have to have grown like 12" at least so far in flowering. Tuesday/Wed we'll put up the carbon scrubber/exhaust, but temps have been awesome still (about 70-73F). Humidity is just getting a bit higher than I'd like now, especially with buds popping up. The carbon scrubber is this DIY-made, heavy metal, sophisticated sum'bitch of epic proportions, but that's for another thread. Tips/comments appreciated! Big picture dump today.
Day 14 of flower! Still not quite done running all the scrubber ducting appropriately, so exhaust still isn't set up. It will be done this weekend though, but otherwise, this closet is officially the baby grow room! Plants are really starting to slurp it up too. Have gone from watering every 5 days to every 3. Switched to Fox Farm Big Bloom for nutes during flower. Tons of baby buds popping, and plants look healthy as hell!
H Hi! I'm a total noob, I was wondering if you could help me out? I've got a little set up going and have just planted my germinated seeds last night. I've watered it once and it's set up under 4 CFL lights,with a fan and it's being kept at 70-77 degrees. I'm not sure if I'm missing any steps.
Hey dude. if i could offer any suggestions i would say maybe try and slowly start bending, or LSTing, them side ways and probably tie them down... like the green lines i drew on your picture. just scoot the pots over to the side and lightly lasso them down. the reason why im saying this is so you can maximize your light's potential. instead of the light hitting the top half really well you could have your light hit the whole plant. its just some food for thought. good luck!
All that sounds pretty good! I think you should probably try to aim closer to the 70F-75F range, if anything. I also don't know much about CFLs at all, I was lucky to start with a buddy's nice MH/HPS lights from his failed growing attempts. So you may want to look into light distancing, to make sure you're avoiding light stress or overheating. I initially placed my light too close, and slowed my first germinated seed's growth for a couple weeks. I highly suggest following along with a similar style grow on www.growweedeasy.com - that's where I've been getting all my start-up information. And, testing your run-off water from waterings for the PH level helps a lot too, and gives you a very specific insight at what's going on with your plants at the root level. Thank you! I was hoping someone would jump in with advice on that, I've seen lots of LST tutorials, but mostly people being proactive about it, so wasn't sure how to go about it really with them already being so tall. I didn't realize you could bend them at this point. I'll get something set up tonight to start working on that. Thanks again!!
Yeah no problem. I think your best bet would be to bend them slowly... maybe try to get them how you like over a few days since your flowering you don't want to stress em too bad with any breakage. I've the same before with an auto that exploded in height. I was cautious and only bent it about 45deg but I was able to move the light and angle it so it shined on the whole plant.
Day 17 of flowering! Watered today with Fox Farm Tiger Bloom at 1tsp per gallon, PH run-off is about 6.5 - 6.8PH. I fed a couple times with veg nutrients at the very beginning of flowering, and I think I'm seeing a bit of nitrogen toxicity (the claw) in the new growth of the two biggest plants. My last two waterings were basic water, and hopefully that will begin to subside. Grow closet is totally set up with scrubber, fan, and ducting up to an exhaust vent in the roof, too! I miss that awesome stank though. Temps holding great at like 65-75F now, though I need to get a dehumidifier, RH is about 50-55%. Also began some plant training to manage the height. I hope I didn't bend them too much! Love how much light is getting to those bud sites now though.
theyre looking great! im excited to see how they finish my humidity varies from 50 to 60 in my tent. im just gonna let it ride. when my scrog screen fills out ill be getting a small fan to keep the canopy aired out but i kinda hate running a dehumifier... too much $$$ lol