TMNTs First Grow (Micro) LONG post. Please read

hi. here's your long response you were waiting for:

for watts per plant..I like to figure it as watts per square foot. I recommend 100w per square foot of cfls. Always real watts not equivalent. So 100w would cover 12" x 12" ... 250w would cover about 2.5 square foot. Also keep in mind that cfls have a penetration of about 10-12" max for bud growth...meaning anything more then 12" from the bulb won't develop. So keep your canopy shallow with proper training or a sog with a bunch of 3" clones. Basically, you could grow a single clone and veg it out for a month, or pack 2.5 sq feet full of 3" x 3" containers (fiji waterbottles ) which you would fit...40 small clones, each could produce 3-7 grams a piece....7 on the very high end in a dialed system in coco with the right strain, etc..---< that's the way I would go for a quick, high producing system...only thing is, you need to get cloning down to an art. imo cloning and growing in coco is the way to go, Alternatively you could grow autos from seed in a similar system...first doing a seed run to make a nice stock of seed. You could even make feminized and all that.

on strains....I'd go with whatever indica you want to grow..something delicious. Start with an indica if you want to clone and keep a small mother plant (recommended) ..if you like sativas, do them later when you get things dialed in. ...I can recommend specific strains/flavors if ya want. Maybe you could get some femmed autos and grow them out while growing some indicas out for mother plants...that would be a good way to start out.

If you want to go with soil foxfarm is the easiest way to go. Their 3 part nutes is also good but I prefer other stuff. I always recommend coco to ppl though. It's basically hydro that you can hand water..It's incredibly ez when you understand it, and I think it's way easier then soil. I have a huge writeup/guide on how I grow in coco and all the stuff I've learned, just ask if ya wanna check it out.

The cycles of the plant are very simple. seedling, veg, flower. Pop a seed under 24hrs or 18/6 light cycle and it will be a seedling for a week or 2, after that it's in vegetative stage...it will stay in vegetative stage, or "veg" forever if you keep the light cycle long...as in 18-24 hours a day of light. clones can be taken indefinitely off of a "mother plant" kept in veg. The clones will all contain the exact characteristics of the original and can be flowered out when ever you want by changing the light cycle to 12/12. also of course the original plant can be flowered the same way, by shortening the light cycle to 12hrs of light/ 12hrs dark.

lighting: generally plants do better with more blue light during veg and more red light during flower. With cfls the bluer spectrum are labeled as "daylight" and the reddish spectrum bulbs are labeled as "warm white". They're not the actual colored bulbs...you'll do fine under just regular warm whites.

for deodorizing check out "wolfman zen's easiest diy carbon filter" ..google it and you'll find the tutorial. It's a very cheap and easy to make carbon filter..about 15$ a piece and will filter about a couple oz.'s of bud/a few months before they need a 5$ recharge.

I'm here almost everyday...I'm down to help with whatever ya want if yer gonna put in the work. check my sig. ask,ask,ask.

 

oh and also, skip the mylar! pretty please n shit. just paint it flat white inside. flat white paint will not hold your plants back in any way....mylar is like the AOL of grow supplies.

 

I'm glad to help! Everything I've learned is from forums and I'm more then happy to give back all I can.

as far as wattage goes..in a dialed growbox you can expect to yield 1/4 to 1/2 grams per watt on your first run, eventually (possibly!) getting up to a gram a watt..that's on the very high end though and few growers can do it with cfls. I would say an average autoflower .. ie, lowrider2..would take up about 1-1 1/2 square feet of canopy...possibly more with training and a nice thin 8-12 inch canopy, and yield .5 - 1.5 oz's There's really too many variables to give you solid #'s on how much you're gonna yield and how many plants it's gonna take to fill a given area..it's best to just get started and see how hte plants grow for you in your box. There's a huge difference in growing in soil and coco and proper watering and lighting etc...It takes alot of practice to realize exactly what this plant is gonna do in a certain environment.

If you want to go with seed to harvest runs, do autos instead of regular indicas (photoperiod plants) a regular, non auto seed will "veg" for about a month and a half before it begins to flower...even if started under 12/12. Then you still have 2 months to flower...so total time from seed to harvest is gonna be closer to 3 - 3.5 months...yielding maybe an oz or 2 in a micro setting. Autos on the other hand can finish as quick as 55 - 80 days from seed cutting your seed to harvest time down quite a bit..(30 - 40%) ..your first run would be primarily to create seeds for you next runs. Just to give you an idea, I recently harvested a small plant in a small fiji water bottle, which are about 2.3 x 2.5 inches and it was about 6 inches tall (12 inches tall total with container. It yielded about 300 seeds.

Keeping a mother plant and cloning is the best way to get quick dependable harvests, but cloning can take some time to get the hang of where you're reliably producing more clones then you can handle, but once you get it down you''l have more clones then you'll know what to do with...I throw away tons of them everyday while trimming back my mothers.

Cloning on the other hand would eventually allow you to put a small clone directly into 12/12 as soon as it has roots and pull that 3-7 grams off of it in 50-70 days depending on "indica" strain...it would take some setup time growing out the seeds and selecting a mom plant (2-3 mnths) but as I said in the meantime you could be popping auto seeds and harvesting by the time the clones from the mothers went into flower. For the time "cycle" or what ever..figure you have a mother plant..you need about 4 inches of branch to clone...I clone in cups of coco, I've tried a ton of different methods and coco is the easiest for me...once in the cup of coco it takes 7-12 days for roots to pop at which point it can be put straight into 12/12 producing 3-7 and finishing in 50-70 days or so. That's would be a zero veg sog.. and it works incredibly well....a bunch of single cola plants...just think if you could fit 60 plants in your flowerbox you could add one and harvest one every day! it's easier to just do weekly cycles of 6 plants though. clones going inot flower in this system are usually 1-4 inches tall and finish about 12-16 inches tall:



You are exactally right about harvesting at a certain % of cloudy trics...but this is decided by the plants genetics...if running autos from seed you will get different variations in the plants..increasing or decreasing flowering time...anywhere from 50 day to 75 day harvest from the same batch of autoflower seeds. Cloning on the otherhand is much more stable ..100% actually. You will always get the exact same flowering times on clones as long as you environment is the same, ie..not changing light cycles, light temperatures, nutes etc... The size of the plant has absolutely no affect on the potency of the bud. Trust me I've grown the same strains under multiple light types and intensities (cfl,led,mh,cmh,hps,ccfl,sun) and the small single cola cfl buds are the most potent and flavorful.

Soft white is probably the same (color temperature aka kelvin) as warm white..depending on brand they label them differently sometimes.

just figure you need 100watts per square foot and you can fit 16 plants per square foot if grown in those fiji water bottles or simliar container ( I started in 20oz Mt dew containers ala "Drbudgreengenes") ...so 40 plants would fit in about 2.5 square feet with about 250 watts.

also for flourescent lighting pll lights are awesome, you'd have to order them off the net but in the long run it's worth it if you can afford the few extra bucks now..I'd figure about 75$ to get pll lighting instead of the regular spiral style flouros, but regular old cfls work great just the same...I'm just throwing that out there. Ask if you want more info on them.

I really don't like mylar for the fact that it's a pain to hang and get perfectly smooth, hard to keep clean, and creates and area behind the mylar that can't be cleaned..mylar is also porous which means it can actually hide bugs,fungus mildew in it if not sanitized properly. Paint on the otherhand is easy to sanitize...I use sanitizing wipes all the time in my box to wipe down the walls and such. Mylar looks cool and it does in fact reflect slightly more light then paint, but that's only when the mylar is hung perfectly flat and kept perfectly clean. Overall paint is just easier to care for and apply..it also creates a nice water barrier and sealant in your box. No offence to anyone but I look at it as the AOL of grow supplies, new growers think it looks all cool and sounds like it works great....but it's 99% aesthetics and hype. Also with white paint I can just slap a new coat on every once in a while (6 months), completely sanitizing and cleaning at the same time.

I'm not the man! hahaha I learned from the best I'm just trying to pass on the knowledge...I mean who the F want to pay 50 bones an 1/8!?

edit: HOLY CRAP that's a long one...sorry I got carried away, I should just write a book or something

 

You could grow your autos under 24 hrs light and they will flower, and also keep your indica mother plant in there and keep it in "veg" under the same light cycle. That's what I love about autos! It's kind of a different twist on growing. I'd actually do more seeds then that when you start so that you have a good selection. Like popping 2 feminized indica for mothers and just killing the smaller weaker of the 2 later...or you could keep them both doubling the amount of clones you can pull later...As long as it isn't over crowding your box..but really you could be chopping clones off them as they grow reducing their size and maybe keeping the clones elsewhere. Personally I'd start 2 femmed indica and 4 autos..2 if they're feminised..count on 50% of the autos being male unless you get those femmed too....but really I'd get standard seeds on the autos so you can make your own seeds for later. I think you could definitely pull 40 clones off a 2 month old mother plant. You might want to pop a few more autos seeds about am onth later in case you have issues cloning, that way you'll still have a steady harvest (perpetual harvest).

Figure that a clone that just popped roots is gonna take about 60 days to flower...also some autos finish that fast too..most are more around 70-75 though. With clones you won't have to weed out the males, but clones are harder to produce then simply popping seeds. If you do want to run with some autos and keep a mother you'll need a seperate box later to keep the mother and clones in...but you'll have 2 months to get it built and it can be really small.

I wouldn't search for the strain with the shortest flowering time...most of that is just hype or marketing stuff. I had a trainwreck from GHS that finished in about 45 days but the yields were much lower as well. IMO anything less then 55 days flower is gonna be small and not worth the time. Just plan on 60 days..makes everything easier...2 months, 8 weeks...just makes it easier to dial in your cycle. I have about 20 different mother plants/strains and I consider 18 of them to be 60 day'ers only my superlemonhaze and supersilverhaze are considered 80 day'ers. Also a kinda marketing thing for seed companies to do is list their "flowering times" not when you switch to 12/12, but starting when the plant starts to bud, ...which is usually 15-20 days into 12/12...pretty deceiving.

I'd be happy to recommend strains here's what I have on hand at the moment: supersilverhaze, superlemonhaze, strawberryhaze, grape punch, OGkush, "L"(mine), whiterussian, buddah's sister, superskunk, querkle, "X"(mine), critical+, GDP, 420blues, NYCdiesel, Jillybean, lemonskunk, bluemoonrocks, bluekush..... hmm..neville's haze..that's all I can remember atm.

..but outta all those, the lemon skunk from greenhouse seeds is my favorite, amazing dankass lemon skunk smell...amazing. great hardhitting high and finishes up @ about 60 second to that would be bluekush or bluemoonrocks..both very similar....amazing candy taste that I never woulda guessed could come from weed. BMR/BK are available at seedboutique from BOG seeds in 10 packs of regular only....but the lemon skunk can be bought from attitude individually feminized for like 9$ I think.

for autos I've only grown sour60, road runner and I'm currently popping a 10 pack of purplegems. The sour60 is great but has a huge varieties of phenos in it.....My choice for you would actually be a strain called "pinkbud"..as that's gonna be my next auto purchase..available only at seedbay and you'd have to send out a money order ..if you don't wanna do that...just check out onyx or autoAK on attitude as well. Actually I think on attitude they have a deal the first few days of each month where you get a few extra freebies.

damnit! wall o text again. sorry, I'll try to keep it short n sweet in the future.

 

yeh! sounding like yer getting a handle on it now...on the size of your other chamber, it should be large enough size for keeping the mother plant (s) in and how ever many clones you want to root at a time. As I said earlier I clone in cups of coco..I use half sized clear solocups and put 4-7 clones in each...(saves a ton of room) once they're rooted I pop them out and rinse in water to separate the roots gently..then they can be put into their own containers, such as fiji water bottles. Once in fiji water bottles I usually veg for a day or 2 so they recover from any transplant shock..then they go into 12/12/. Clones also need very little light while they're rooting..ideally you could put a wire or glass shelf under your mother plants and keep the clones underneath...the amount of light would be about perfect.

on the lighting..you'd be fine to just run softwhite the whole time...maybe adding a few daylights in during veg. Running all daylight in flower will make for leafy smaller buds.

with fiji water bottles, (cardboard pint milk cartons are the same size but not as reusable btw) you can fit 16 per square foot.

I'll do a little update in my thread about how I clone in detail. I feel cloning is very important for a nice steady system.

 

lol yeh..I'll pm it to you.

 

soil will work great in them too, I just prefer coco..I think it's easier and I get better results. Think of coco as hydro that you hand water...just containers of "stuff" that you pour water onto just like soil.

 

fiji. or if you have an albertson's grocery store they carry an "icelandic h20" water that's also about the same size. lol...it's funny I searched and searched and those were the best bottle..I get high sometimes and go shopping for certain items for hours..looking all over a store for the right sized whatever.

 

lol don't freak out man!

I can keep a bushy mother and about 15 of her clones in 10"w x 10"d x 12"h. If you need any help on the build let me know, do a google search on "ngb cabinet" to see some different designs of all in one cabs. They usually have 50% of the area for flower then the other half is divided in the middle via a shelf with exhaust, filter and electrics on top, and the mother/clone room underneath.

 

If I were to SOG in my tent 36 width, 20 length, bout 5 1/2 ft tall. Using my 400 watt hps and your coco/Fiji bottle technique how many plants can I fit in there, and what kind of results am I lookin at? Roots organics Buddha bloom/grow and the other tomato for micros. Also would this idea work:

I only have one OG kush seed left. I'm thinking about vegging for a little while to get quite a few clones off it at once and stick all the clones in @ 12/12. Then over time trim the sides off and continuously produce 2nd gen clones. Is it feasible or too good to be true?

Very eager for your response.

kep420