Oregon legal reacreational northern lights grow first timer.

I'm late starting this so i have some catching up to do, i live in oregon where we legalized recreational marijuana on july 1st. I built a 4x4 box from 2x4's and osb sheeting. waterproofed it, lined the inside with mylar and painted the res of the inside white and the outside my typical geeky black. It contains a 600 watt dimmable appollo MH/HPS with an air cooled hood, carbon filter with a 6" inline exhaust fan that just blows out the top into the room with 4 4" intakes at the bottom covered with prefilters since i have a cat and added some boxes for shades over the two facing the door to prevent light getting in and two small hurricane oscillating fans one of witch i have on a timer to shut off while the lights are off. Light cycle is set to 18/6. I do not have an a/c i'm controlling the room temp by opening the window a crack and the door with a fan blowing out. Using fox farms trio of nutrients and cal-mag plus but have not fed them yet. Started 5 northern lights seeds in a cup of water on aug 8th. Aug 9th Transfered them to paper towels in a warm dark place. Aug 10th 4 of the seeds cracked open exposing some roots and i planted them, one seed turned out to be a dud but i only needed four anyway. Aug 12th the seeds popped up and i quickly figured out i had over watered them. I let them dry untill aug 15 and they really perked up. Aug 15 They were dry and the cups were really light so i gave them a little water from the top and watered them from the bottom for about 10 minutes and put them back in. Today aug 16 i can tell i gave them a little too much water again but not bad and they look pretty good still. I do have one retarded plant trying to only grow out one side that i'm not sure if i damaged it or it has a genetic defect or what but she looks healthy so i plan to let her go and see. I turned my light up to 75% today to see if i can get the growth to pick up the light is now at 450 watts or so and 15.5 inches from the plants. I built a scrog net to go in the box but with how difficult this is already i don't think i'm going to use it untill at least my second crop, Second after my first "successful" crop that is since i'm not sure this one will be. I'm hoping for the best but trying to prepare for the worst. Pics below will catch you up to day 9 since i put the seeds in the water day 6 since they popped up. Any constructive criticism or advice is more than welcome. I'll say now nope i do not have cfl's i'm trying with mh fromt he start, given the sheer amount of conflicting views i'm going to just see how it goes with mh/hps only and if they fry i will start more with cfl's. Thanks for taking the time to check out my grow.

 

One thing i just thought about that i did that might have been weird or messed something up is the coco coir needed to be flushed bad and i was worried about the high ph in the soil since i didn't use seed starter i just put it right into 2 parts ffof, 2 parts black gold, 1 part perlite and one part coco-coir so i flushed the soil real good with about a liter of water per plastic cup with ph 6 water then let the soil dry out before i used it. I don't know if it helped or hurt anything but they're growing so i'm guessing it wasn't too bad. Now i'm worrying about weather or not there's enough nutrients in the soil, maybe i should feed them earlier than normal.

 

Still on day 6 since they popped up out of the soul and now i noticed two of the cups have roots coming out of the bottom already. Currently seeking advice on the forums as to what i can do about it, they seem really small to have enough of a root ball to transplant to me but my eye is as of yet untrained. I sprayed the bottom of the cup to keep the root wet since i don't know what to do, it wasn't sitting in run off.

 

Got pics?

 

Beautiful!

 

So last night i took a bit of a risk and gently put the roots back in the holes it was sticking out of with a sterilized chopstick, i know ghetto right? Anyway today they still look ok maybe a little over watered. I think there's a high pressure system and the humidity dropped and now my box has been sitting around 40% and i'm a little worried it's too low for the seedlings. They look good to me but not quite right. I'm guessing it may be too much water still even though the soil feels almost dry now it's wet an inch or two down. I tried putting a bowl of water in the box, it made no difference in the humidity. I tried spraying the inside of the box with water on the walls, it made a 2 point difference for ten minutes or so until it all evaporated. Will probably have to wait for the weather to go back to normal to fix it. The gimpy retarded plant is more retarded than ever. Do they look healthy to you guys? i swear when i'm in the box looking at them they look more yellow than they do in the picture, maybe it's the metal halide light causing an optical effect. Yeah i'm fishing for advice again. =)

 

Here's the gimpy one. . .

 

I'm not sure it's even worth it i live pretty much on the beach in oregon so it's rare for it to be so dry here and shouldn't last more than a few days at the most, can the weather 3 or 4 dry days at this stage? my eye is untrained on this but when i look at them they look pretty healthy even though it's dry i'm probably just a worry wart.

 

Cups were super light and looked about bone dry so i gave them a watering with 1/8 dose of ff big bloom in it and a spritz of 6.5 water. I only gave them a little food because i flushed the fresh soil before i planted to get rid of excess nutrients. I'm a noob and maybe i shouldn't have done that but i did so i figured i can compensate a little with really low doses of food. humidity in the box is still low but i don't expect that will last more than another day or two because it's just a weather system causing it, it's normally much higher here. Still looking a little droopy but pretty good to me. The retard plant in the back has some really weird growth. you guys think it was too early to water with them looking like they do? i snapped this pic just a couple minutes after i watered so it's pretty much what they looked like at the time plus some spritz on em. The cups were practically weightless and really dry though. did notice nice white veins are starting to show in the bigger leaves, it freaked me out and i looked it up and found some examples of healthy plants that looked exactly like them minus a little bit of down curl witch i'm still not certain is over watering. wondering if i might have some heat stress between 79 and 82. The light has been at 450 watts and almost 16 inches up for two days now and the plants don't look any worse from it.

 

Going to add some ducting to vent the box out of the room to try to lower the heat today.

 

Got my ducting going out the door now, don't know how much it will help as i have a good sized light for my box but any heat gone away is heat gone away. ff big bloom is only .01 .3 and .7 i gave them 1/8 of fox farms instructions for seedlings. I don't see any ill effects as yet and it's been all day. The cups were pretty much bone dry when i watered but i watered lightly until it ran out the bottom. they don't like that much water i can tell but they still look pretty good. Everything i read said northern lights is easy to grow and highly resistant to mold and fungus. so far so good and win lose or utter defeat i plan on documenting the whole thing so i don't mess it up again, if i do in the first place. A few pics here snapped right as i'm typing this. Got a couple of the weird growth on birtha, Decided she needed a name since she's special. The leaves aren't drooping anymore than they were from the first watering. in fact they look better now than when the humidity got out of hand in the humidome baggies. Thanks for the input and for sharing your experience, i hope mine can help someone too. I might just be a noob but birtha in the last two pics despite the weird growth is growing faster than the others just not growing normally.

 

Day 13 since seeds were put in water day 9 since seedling popped up: Still a little droopy, trying to get the watering thing down. I know i'm close but still a little heavy on it. The light feeding didn't burn them what so ever. I'm thinking i will let them dry out for four days then water light and transplant to 7" pots on monday. They look healthy to me except for some drooping in a few leaves. If anyone thinks they don't please share what you think is up with them cause if they are unhealthy it's gone way over my untrained eyes. The box is holding steady at 79 and dropping to around 72-73 at night when the lights off, humidity around 50%.

 

Got a profile pic, are my nodes too close together? I really don't know how far those nodes will spread out as it grows or how close they should be at this stage. My lights still set at 450 watts and about 15 inches above them. Can barely feel any heat on the back of my hand at their level. Thinking when this next set of leaves come in witch should be five fingered if i read right i should raise the light a little and bump it up to 600 watts. Not sure if that's a bad idea, been getting a lot of folks telling me just the MH light in the first place was a bad idea but it seems to be doing the trick.

 

Decided to transplant today, got three of them done without a hitch. Birtha however had a strange and underdeveloped root system. She had a small ball at the top then one little string of a root going down to an even smaller ball at the bottom witch ended up breaking off. I covered the remaining roots and soil with rooting hormone and got her in her new home, hoping i did not kill her. I totally wanted to see her retarded ass grow up. Put them into pretty much the same soil mix but used a little more perlite and a little less coco, thought it might help with my over watering problem. Thinkin these 7 inch pots will be good untill their about a foot tall, sound right?