Im on a short budget! Ill be growing a single plant, 1.5'x1.5'x2.75' under 4 CFLs. they will be either 40 watts or 23, whichever i come by first. daylight for veg, soft white for flower. Foxfarm Happy Frog organic soil, i will not be using nutes or anything, i want a very clean grow. i will have an open ventilation system, i dont need to worry about smell too much, as long as i keep it somewhat contained, but i will have a fan on it. I plan on growing some bagseed, but will probably end up ordering white widow which i heard is easy for a first timer. i feel confident i can get it to grow, and even bud up, but what can i be looking at in terms of yield? and it must have good quality bud from ww genetics. side note, i plan on throwing the light cycle on 12/12 after 2 weeks, to keep the plant small, a smaller plant can better utilize light.
Considering you want to use cfls, I will rate your yield and quality of your grow as low. Metal Halide is recommended for vegging while High Pressure Sodium bulbs are recommended for flowering. MH/HPS grow lights work much better for growing than cfl does. Much tighter, heavier, denser buds than with cfls. As far as nutes, you need nutes starting at about the fourth week or at about the flower cycle. A lot of people on here including myself use Fox Farm Trio nutes. Its organic which means that it will be clean. No miracle grow taste left behind. To control the smell, a carbon filter is a must. They stink pretty bad once you hit the fourth week of flowering. I don't know how much you plan on trying to yield, but if you want anything more than an 8th, you might want to check on a growing area with more height. Get something that is at least 6 feet tall. You should also let the plant veg for longer than 2 weeks. Letting it go for another 2 weeks will increase your yield tremendously. You can grow bag seed, but I would advise against it. The genetics are in the seed. If you grow white widow, you will have the dankest bud around.
i have room for some indica, i got floor room but limited height. im sure i can LST, or just top it to get more cola site. Ive seen decent clf grows on youtube, i want 20-30 grams per plant. i cant afford better lights, as i dont have a decent ventilation system. i want to note that "8 oz of bud for less than $100" book really opened my eyes to CFLs and their potential. the lights i can adjust to keep close, to keep the plant from stretching. but i have trouble believing ill barely manage an 8th.
You can easily get an oz in that space. However because of the low height you will have to do a lot of training to keep the plants low. a scrog grow is without doubt the only way for you. Giving the space taken up by the lamps and the pots your actual plant hight is going to be less than 1ft you need to fill that floor with root room, so either get a big ass pot and cut down the height or use Rubbermaid tub or something and drill some holes in the bottom. Using 2 tubes one inserted in to the other works well. Obviously only the inner pot has drainage holes. It makes it easier to take out and thoroughly water now and then. You reall could do with a pot that fills the bottom but is only 6-8 high. Train your plant along a screen and you can get a massive amount of small bud sites keeping the lights close to them you will easily get an oz I did a similar grow but I had 4ft of hight so a lot easier but I used 125w of CFL and harvested just slightly over 3 oz. That was one plant but she was very old and I had been training her on the screen for a long time. Much longer than a sog approach and a lot of work, but worth it in the end. I'll try and sort out a few photos for you to see what I'm on about
Btw I don't understand why you think adding nutrients to the soil is somehow dirty. There's already nutrients in there but you need to replace them as they are used up or your plants will suffer.
this is an old mother plant that I decided to bud off. She is already quite old and has a full root system so growth was fast when I moved her on to the scrog method This is her just coming through the screen. Everytime a shoot came through I would push it back through one of the holes eventually filling the entire screen. It took several weeks before it was ready to bud. I'll try and find some photos if it when it was in full bud
Sounds like a cool idea. Just remember to keep those bulbs as close as u can without burning your plant. About adding nutes... I'm so glad your trying to avoid doing this! It's simply unnecessary. However there are a few steps you need to take to ensure that your plants have all the nutrition they require available to them. If your starting out with happy frog as your base you will need to add amendments to this mix or your plant will consume all the nutrition from that happy frog relatively quickly. Different soil amendments serve different purposes. For instance, alfalfa meal or blood meal will provide nitrogen, bone meal provides phosphorous, worm castings and compost provide microbial life which helps breakdown your amendments into plant usable forms. Kelp meal provides an array of vitamins as well as potassium. The organics section here at GC is badass! Check it out sometime. You can learn to make your own soil mixes very easily that are truly organic (unlike the fox farm lineup) that provide you with that clean smoking organic herb goodness your looking for. Here is an example of what you can do to beef up that happy frog so it sustains your plant from start to finish with only watering, no chemical nutes. Base- ff happy frog, add to this per cubic foot... 2 cups blood meal or alfalfa meal 2 cups kelp meal 2 cups bone meal or fish bone meal 2 cups espoma tomato tone 1 cup sul po mag 1 cup dolomite lime or crushed oyster shell 25% worm castings or quality compost 25% aeration material such as perlite or pumice Mix it all together thoroughly, moisten, and allow to sit ( called cooking) for 3-4 weeks. This allows the soil microbes to cycle the nutrients in your amendments making them available to your plant. With a mix like this you should only need to water throughout the entire grow. And the best part is that you can throw ph ppm etc out the window! Your living soil will take care of itself as far as ph and ppm are concerned. No checking/ adjusting. It is very important however that you use dechlorinated or chlorine free water. Chlorine will harm the micro herd living in the soil and a happy micro herd means a happy plant. Good luck with your grow, try to avoid the bottle at all costs, check out the organics section lots of knowledgeable helpful people.
As your pretty new I would recommend keeping it simple as far as nutrients go, but you will need to ad some whatever form they are in unless you have a huge pot. But then you will have oxygen starvation. Adding nutes may not be "necessary" meaning the plant may survive but there is a world of difference between surviving and thriving