I have done several articles here mostly aimed at the small personal use grower. What do I mean by doing everything wrong? Obviously there is a bit of satire in there, but I ignore almost all of the complexity and myth surrounding growing and my plants are ALWAYS picture perfect. Reverse osmosis or filtered water? Nope. The hardest water in the country - straight up. Cool CFLS or blue LEDs for seedling/veg? Nope. Warm CFLS and white LEDs have plenty of blue. Lots of light? Nope. A single 23 watt CFL or 15 watts of warm white LEDs. Complex hydro system? Nope. Lava rock from my yard in an ordinary flower pot. Temperarture control? Nope. My hot closet. (Southwest desert). Good airflow? Nope. No fan. See the thread on my bucket lamps. PH meter and PPM meter? Nope. I use half the recommended dosage and never test. Optimal nutrition? Nope. I use super cheap dry nutes. Do I measure the amount of water given daily? Nope. No bugs, no wilting, 100% survival past a 95% germination rate, no leaf curl, no spots, no yellowing, just happy, healthy plants. What variety? Doesn't matter much IMO. Then what is my 'secret' ? LEAVE THE FUCKING PLANT ALONE! It knows what it is doing. Give it the basics WITHOUT OVERDOING and get out of the way. I see grow after grow with farmers having 20 bottles of over-hyped shit and mega lights, the latest measuring devices and sick, tortured plants - and wondering what went wrong. Now before the naysayers jump all over me, could I get a better yield using the best technology? Of course! But having all that does not guarantee a better crop. Would I get super-scientific if I went large-scale? Sure. My simple system works great for my personal stash and looks better than many growers with thousands invested. My advice: start super simple and then when you get everything dialed in, add ONE AND ONLY ONE new variable until that is also dialed in. By taking baby steps, you rarely go backwards or end up disappointed. Throwing the kitchen sink at your plants, unless you truly know what you are doing, is asking for disaster. Hope this helps. Here is pretty Wanda, a three and a half week old Sugar Haze grown under a single 23 watt warm white CFL: She is about 7" tall and 10" wide. Gee, no cool blue AND no stretching? How can that be? I have three much larger others almost twice her size started at the same time, but decided to show Wanda as she was the sickly runt of the group. Will flip to flower next week as her hot sativa blood will have her reaching for the ceiling.
Very nice plant and post =^x^= I can attest to the /hands off/ approach. I had a couple seedlings I ran out of room for and just stuck them in a pot of composted dirt and put them in the window. They also get untested tap water. They're small but they're budding just fine. It's remarkable how little it takes, though I can't argue that better conditions will usually yield better results. Keep up the good (or bad?) work!
Guess I need a space-age grow room overcrowded with the latest strain of the month to get more replies. A single healthy plant without Superthrive, bat guano, AN 10 part nutes, a 5 megawatt CMH and a top ten Cup Winner is not comment-worthy. Oh well...
Interesting post! I've been meaning to make something similar but you beat me to it. For starters: I don't grow pot and don't intend to, but I enjoy reading the grow posts here. Second: I'm old and have been growing vegetables all my life, since I was a kid. Nearly everything I've read at GC are things that any vegetable gardener already knows. From how to germinate, growing medium, lighting, watering, feeding, etc. etc. it's all standard "green thumb" stuff. There doesn't seem to be anything unique about growing MJ. Some types of plants need more water than others, some plants need to dry out completely before getting more water, some plants need heavy feeding, others don't, some plants will only thrive in full sun, some prefer some shade -- all standard veg or flower garden knowledge. I see more problems here from overfeeding than anything else. The mindset (found throughout life too) apparently is: "if some is good, more is better." Any farmer worth his salt knows to be careful with fresh manure, especially chicken manure as it may burn plants. It's the exact same thing with non-manure fertilizers. Any plant will thrive in its native, outdoor environment. To grow anything indoors you have to duplicate the conditions in which it grows wild. Duplicating Mother Nature is not always so easy, as everybody knows. But tweaking stuff down to the tiniest detail, from my experience by starting veg and flower seedlings indoors in the spring, will not make any noticeable difference. Commercial indoor vegetable farmers, for example, probably have to get fairly anal about it in order to max out production by copying Mother Nature as closely as possible. But I assume they have scientific guidelines that they follow closely, and do not overfeed or over water. Aside from all this, much of this knowledge is instinct after a while: you can tell when any plant needs water. It won't hurt it to dry out a bit, and they will snap back very quickly when watered. Nature often does not water ideally and plants thrive anyway. At any rate, as the OP says, leave it alone! Don't smother your plants with love, give them some breathing room -- at least to a point! I'm betting the differences aren't even measurable.
Thanks! I've been following this http://forum.grasscity.com/indoor-grow-journals/1114038-indoor-stealth-grow.html thread from the beginning and was going to comment on it. I never did and probably won't now. You broke the ice on this topic and I made my post here instead.
What amazes me is that even people who have been around the block with a dozen grows under belt, in sophisticated rooms with 1000w HIDs, CO2 units and all the measuring gear, still exhibit nute burn on their plants. I could pick almost any grow log here and find burnt leaf tips It must be the whole Western mentality thang of pushy dominance instead of working in harmony with our green brethren; some sort of fear of not achieving some numeric gram per watt harvest that a neighbor claimed to get as if that it what it is all about. To me, it is like trying to force a woman to love you. It cannot be done.
I notice he has at least 20 times the amount of light needed for that seedling. By that I mean that 99% of the light is not even hitting the leaves. I go on about this endlessly, that lighting up your grow space does nothing if the photons are not contacting the plant.
Haha! Good points! Especially about the Western dominance thing: when I was a kid our mothers let us go out (they wanted us OUT of the house, actually) and do what little boys do. I grew up next to a creek and acres of woods. We were never bored. Today, from what I see mothers smother their kids, afraid they are going to get hurt or something, and won't let their kids experience the bad with the good. This, by extension, is what you're talking about with plants.
Sorry folks for discontinuing this grow log. I assumed that because 'Wanda' was the runt, that it was female. I was wrong. Had to pull him. The other three giants all turned out to be female. I was an idiot for growing pure sativas in a limitied headspace grow area, but I got the seeds for free. I had to snap all three of the ladies in half to keep them out of the light.