First off hello all, I'm new here. Not new to smoking just to this site and growing. I've been studying the best I can but between college and survival it's hard to fit researching growing into the mix. So I'm basically going to go over my plan, anyone with any suggestions or such please leave comments to help me get off to growing on the right first step! So heres my situation. I've been allotted a space for growing in the garage, roughly 5'x5'x7'. The garage is large and passively vented. I want to go with a grow tent solution, but it seems tent growing means hydroponics. I believe this should be more than adequate for my plans of growing about four plants. I plan on using the SOG method as I intend to only be growing this for my own purposes. The thing is I can't do anything to the garage other than mount things by screw or nail, I can't cut any exhaust holes in the walls or anything. I live in the desert and during the summer you can guess how my garage gets. These are the two tents I'm looking at. http://www.cdgrowlight.com/Homebox-Indoor-Growing-Tents Model L http://www.cdgrowlight.com/Indoor-Growing-Products/Environmental-Control/Dark-Room-two DR90 So onto my questions, any and all help is welcome! 1.Does tent growing mean I have to do Hydroponics? I've never done anything like this before and beyond the obvious complexity of hydroponics as opposed to soil growing I can't afford the investment hydro requires. So if tent growing means hydro then I guess i can't tent grow. 2. The tent site recommends a 400W light, I plan on cycling my lights from 6500ks to 2200ks but instead of a single bulb I would like to use two 200w bulbs in place of a single 400w bulb. Is this a good idea or a bad one? I think that this should allow more total light coverage of my grow by having more points of light. I may even consider three 150w bulbs. 3. If a tent is for hydroponics only, then I need another growing solution. One that's as easy to setup and use as a tent system. Also around the same price, excluding the cost of soil,nutes and such. My initial start up cost (lights, venting/fans and grow room) need to run me around $300 bucks. Basically the things which should be permanent to semi permanent. Anything that gets renewed regularly isn't included in my start up cost. Any and all help is greatly appreciated. Also anyone with experience with tent growing would be great. Finally I'm not against hydroponics, just the cost of them. If anyone knows how I can get the tent and hydroponics together for around 300 bucks then I'm in.
You sure sound ready bro, but no you dont have to go hydro in a tent soil is fine. To get tha best bang for your buck go with tha 400 cool tube cuz 3 150s would be cool but itll get messy and hot n youll prolly get more lumens from a 400. For exhaust I juss bought a valuline 6in fan 435 cfm for 130 kinda noisy tho but nice power in my opinion hope this helps some stoned glued to my couch atm
1. No. Hydroponics really isn't that much more difficult. It requires a few more tools and equipment though. The equipment costs can be... overwhelming. 2. It'll be fine. More bulbs isn't always better though. Look up the lumen rating of each bulb and compare two bulbs to one higher watt bulb. 3. See #1. If you have a lot of the parts, you could build a DWC bucket for less than 100 bucks. There are stickies, look at em.
Thanks guys. Good to hear Hydro isn't required for a tent cause the cost just isn't within my range. I'll look into the lumens. Any more advice is always welcome. Thanks again everyone.
My only other advice is spend the money for a carbon filter or build a good one. Don't skimp. The smell will give your grow away, and you don't want that. Oh yeah, PLEASE for the love of sanity, do not give your plants stupid female names. It's really really cheesy.
Lol. Yeah the tent system I'm looking at comes with a carbon filter, but I'm sure I could build one pretty easy. I've done that before for a totally unrelated thing lol. Don't worry about the names, won't be doing that. I hope. lol. I'm actually looking at building my own DWC bucket as you mentioned before. Looks like I could build one for about 20 bucks, totally realistic. The DWC brings two more questions to the table... If I build DWC buckets, can I flower my grow in them aswell? If not what should I transplant them into? Also, I live in the desert, so it does get hot here. For keeping the solution in a DWC cool, can I toss ice in there? lol, or do I need to be more creative about keep the solution cool? Since I assume ice would throw off the PH balance.