high red eyed guys, i'm new in growing and i love it, so i have in my closet 2 amnesia xxl auto and a critical 2.0 auto, i have now 340 real watts worth of CFLs 6500k with an avg of 60lumens/watt (4*55w+120w) i live in a hot place where temps outside reach 100°f in the shadow, so doing my best to keep my babies cool using what i have under the hand, i actually can't afford a cooler so temps varies between 83f and 92f, most of the time it's at 88, i actually want to add 110w worth of cfls but worried about the temps going out of controle if i did, so i wanted to ask if it would be worth the risk to add that light, also tell me if they look good/big anough for their age,the right (amnesia) is 19 (got a lil bit burned by a bulb), while the middle (amnesia) and left (critical) are 22days old, and they are reacting at the very opposite of what they are supposed to, the critical (indica) is getting tall while the amnesia (sativa) is going small and bushy,( is it time to/should i even lst them?), a small fan is blowing on them to keep them from burning and i'm seeing these very small insects coming to them but not hurting the plants so should i keep killing them or let them have a good time in my little heaven? thank's for your answers, have a good one !
They look good so far. Don't know how big a fan you've got going, but if your temps are on the high side, you really need good strong air moving around your plants to help disperse some of that heat. If you're already at temps that high, you don't need to push it anymore. Heat is one thing that will kill a plant fast if it's in the danger zone, and you're already higher than what I like. The optimum temp is mid to high 70's. The Indicas don't like heat and humidity and do better in cooler temps. The Sativas don't seem to be bothered so bad by heat. But mid 80's is about as high as I like to go. We live in the SE US and heat and humidity are the name of the game in summer, so we had to air condition the flower rooms to get the temps down. You are doing OK with that plant right now, but when it comes time for flower, you desperately need more wattage of better quality flower lighting than anything you've got there. The CFLs work OK for veg, but simply do not have the power to get the plant to come on out and grow the way you want. Without enough wattage, you don't get the bud development or plant size that you could if you did have enough wattage and the right spectrum of light. The thing is, with temps already an issue for you, anything you put in that space that could actually flower them out nicely for you is going to skyrocket the temps to killer range. You need to rethink your grow space and make changes so you can run the right lighting to get good flowering from your plants. But what you're doing now is giving you good experiencing in taking care of the plants and looks like you've done a really nice job on that end of things. You just won't get anything big as far as plant size or weight at harvest unless you get some real flower lighting over your plants. TWW
As far as the bugs go...get rid of them. You shouldn't have any bugs around your plants. Your soil looks too wet actually. Do you have any perlite added to the soil or anything to help aerate it. These plants need defined wet/dry cycles to stay healthy. You water them and let them use up almost all that water before you put anymore in. They don't like the roots sitting in wet soil all the time and that is usually the thing that draws bugs to them. Treat your grow space like a lab environment. Your humidity is probably high too if you're getting bugs. Go to GrowWeedEasy.com and check out their pics for pests and see if you see anything that matches it. That's a pretty good place to diagnose issues and get general information from. TWW
thank u very much for the feedback, actually, i watered them yesterday after a good 5 dry days, the humidity is most of the times around 50%-55% yesterday it unexpectedly peeked at 75%, for the flowering, i was thinking about either getting 2700kelvin cfls for the red spectrum or if i'm lucky anough to get the money needed make a small polycarbonate greenhouse for them to flower, actually HPSs would become even useful in the country i live cause the winter comes very cold, but in the summer its the very opposite, the fan i use is pretty small, i was using a bigger one but it made the leaves' ages curl so i changed it, this one is as big as my hand opened, and sure i'm learning so much, now i can recognise mag def, nitrogen aboundance and other stuff that happened till here just by eye, btw i wrote too much excuse my enthousiasme, just wanted to ask about the training, should it accure now ?
I'd just keep an eye on your plant leaves - if the insects aren't hurting the plants then I wouldn't personally worry about them. But just keep a close eye on them until you're sure. Just blowing heat around in an enclosed area won't do anything but dry the plants (and soil) up faster. You NEED to be sucking/blowing the heat out of the area. Ideally you need an exhaust and an intake - one in and one out. The one blowing the heat out of the area should be the more powerful one than the one returning cooler air into the tent. If your fan exhausting hot air is strong enough, the return (intake) location will suck cooler air back in automatically. Exhausting the heat out of your area is crucial and especially in the hotter summer months. Too hot of temperatures will have you fighting things until you take care of it. J
thanks for the feedback, i understand that, i was actually doing the opposite, the fan blowing on them is out of the closet (closet always oppened i learned to leave it like that the hard way), i consider that one as an intake and it's the bigger one, while a small (cpu heat sink) blows out the hot air of the bulbs from the top of the (oppened) closet, so i was wondering by area do you mean room or closet? also i live in an area where there is no growing of any kind hundreds of miles around and very very rare ppl knows its specific smell here so if i put an exhaust on the window of my room to the outside in your experience, could my upstairs or downstairs neighbors smell it? in which way will the smell go? or will it just follow the wind..? oh, and i was sad having to kill those bugs they seemed so innofensive and wasn't even trying to run when trying to catch them, i'll be analysing their behaviour now ^^ can't even wait to taste my lovely garden